Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

DH123


The sound was in mono, was it picked up by Brandon's mic  or mixed separately?

It was recorded using a mic connected to one of the cameras.

The Youtube video of this song has better quality, makes sense now.   maybe a line-in might not have been such a bad idea.

As is, the video made my friend (a Pro Tools fanboy) **** his pants.

Brandon, I did not see any audio monitors on your video... is that normal ?

Was everything playing from one disk? Or is Sonar like logic able to play each track from a different disk (if desired)

Jose7822

dontletmedrown


It's funny that so many of you are surprised.  I was doing sessions this size on Sonar 5 (minus the video, with twice as many plugins) on my old dual-core system.  I'd imagine the i7 is probably capable of 3-4 times that workload.

Yeah, but he's doing all that at 96 samples (2.2 ms).  I don't think a Dual Core can do that :-)
 
 

I see.  Still doesn't require 64-bit though.  I have the same i7 in my setup and can run similar finished projects at 64 samples using xp32.  Point being, this is more of an i7 showcase than a Sonar one, right? 

dontletmedrown

Jose7822

dontletmedrown


It's funny that so many of you are surprised.  I was doing sessions this size on Sonar 5 (minus the video, with twice as many plugins) on my old dual-core system.  I'd imagine the i7 is probably capable of 3-4 times that workload.

Yeah, but he's doing all that at 96 samples (2.2 ms).  I don't think a Dual Core can do that :-)
 
 

I see.  Still doesn't require 64-bit though.  I have the same i7 in my setup and can run similar finished projects at 64 samples using xp32.  Point being, this is more of an i7 showcase than a Sonar one, right? 

Perhaps a little bit of both.
 
If 64 bit was required or not for this project depends on how much RAM they were using in it.  Maybe Brandon can give us more detail on that..? :-)
 
All I know is that, for the first time ever since I started using Sonar 64 bit, I'm able to use the full resources of my system with 32 bit plugins.  I mean, that's just incredible!  Not even the limits imposed by 32 bit processes can stop my system from using all its RAM.  This is how you make history my friend :-)
 
 

dontletmedrown

Jose7822

dontletmedrown


It's funny that so many of you are surprised.  I was doing sessions this size on Sonar 5 (minus the video, with twice as many plugins) on my old dual-core system.  I'd imagine the i7 is probably capable of 3-4 times that workload.

Yeah, but he's doing all that at 96 samples (2.2 ms).  I don't think a Dual Core can do that :-)
 
 

I see.  Still doesn't require 64-bit though.  I have the same i7 in my setup and can run similar finished projects at 64 samples using xp32.  Point being, this is more of an i7 showcase than a Sonar one, right? 

The project doesn't work for me at 32-bit as it needs the available RAM of x64. It will work without the video or with the video but less synths, etc. It's also much snappier under x64.

Jose7822

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

Muziekschuur at home


Was everything playing from one disk? Or is Sonar like logic able to play each track from a different disk (if desired)

It was loading and playing from a single solid-state drive.

 
Solid State drives are still expensive, but you could easily achieve this track count with RAID 0.

True they are expensive, but getting cheaper all the time - and bigger. It's actually not out of hand to purchase a 250GB now.

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

Jose7822

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

Muziekschuur at home


Was everything playing from one disk? Or is Sonar like logic able to play each track from a different disk (if desired)

It was loading and playing from a single solid-state drive.

Solid State drives are still expensive, but you could easily achieve this track count with RAID 0.

True they are expensive, but getting cheaper all the time - and bigger. It's actually not out of hand to purchase a 250GB now.

PC Audiolabs doesn't seem to offer a solid state drive as an option on their build-a-system pages. I would imagine then that was added by the person who bought the system after delivered by PCAL. Never used one.

Impressive, and congrats..the whole system seemed to be working really well.

Now, 140 tracks....oh my!!...8)....

I start to wonder about my arrangement if I hit more than 24...8).....


cheers

Wiz

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

WDI


Cool stuff guys!!!!!

Only thing I noticed is the sound kinda glitches when you press stop on the control surface. Like it's not a clean stop. I know, small detail, but that's important to me, the little details. I'm not talking about the effects tails. Isn't there an option to avoid that stuff in Sonar 8? Like an auto fade setting or something. Thought there was.

Also, of course no offense to Cake at all, but I see this stuff all the time on forums, like I can get 10000000 tracks. Doesn't mean much if nothings playing. What's more important to me is actually how many audio tracks are playing at once at a certain sample rate/bit depth. And then to confuse things worse is soft synths. Depending on what synth your using the CPU could be very taxed.

Yes you can set the start/stop buffers in audio options to clean up...well...start/stop. Mine could maybe have been higher on stop.

Actually virtual synths do matter even if they are not playing as they consume CPU, especially at low latency, and RAM.

"Actually"... indeed! As you can see from my signature below, I was experimenting with just one instance of Z3ta+/no audio trks/no other plug-ins, operating sonar64 with maybe 40 voice polyphony on the z3 and had a processor hit of more than 50%.

eratu


Nice work, Brandon. What format (codec) of AVI file was that? Also, what frame rate? Seemed to work quite smoothly for you. :)

Thanks! It's an NTSC DV encoded 29.97 .avi.

eratu

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

eratu


Nice work, Brandon. What format (codec) of AVI file was that? Also, what frame rate? Seemed to work quite smoothly for you. :)

Thanks! It's an NTSC DV encoded 29.97 .avi.

Great to know what codec is working so well in Sonar x64! Thank you! Making notes... :)

I'm not actually sure as I didn't do the rendering - just dragged it in. I'll see what I can find out for you. I believe this particular render came out of Vegas if that helps.

Jose7822


Hey Brandon,

You can use this free app that tells you everything there is to know about the encoding of the video file:

http://gspot.headbands.com/

It works in Vista64 too even though it doesn't say it.


Take care!

Cool utility...thanks Jose.

It says the codec is "dvsd" - a DVC/DV video codec by Panasonic.

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

eratu

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

eratu


Nice work, Brandon. What format (codec) of AVI file was that? Also, what frame rate? Seemed to work quite smoothly for you. :)

Thanks! It's an NTSC DV encoded 29.97 .avi.

Great to know what codec is working so well in Sonar x64! Thank you! Making notes... :)

I'm not actually sure as I didn't do the rendering - just dragged it in. I'll see what I can find out for you. I believe this particular render came out of Vegas if that helps.

Hi Brandon, I wasn't clear, sorry -- you already said it was NTSC DV at 29.97 and an AVI -- the codec is DV, that's the info I needed -- so what I *meant* to say was that it is great to know that DV was the codec used.

Also great to know that it came out of Vegas -- we use that a lot too, so I'm just narrowing down the things that will work best for Sonar x64. The demo was impressive, particularly at that latency, so these little details matter. :) But no need to get more info on the AVI file unless you want to -- the rest is frosting.

If you do ask around about video codecs in general, I would be interested to know what codecs you guys find are the best in Sonar x64. I've had trouble with Sonar x86 in XP with some codecs, so for x64 I wonder if there are any additional tips we should know to get that type of smooth performance.

Thanks again!

Best, James

P.S.: Jose: I know you've been working the x64 side quite successfully -- if you've had a chance to test some codecs, would you mind posting the ones you know work well in x64? (Maybe in another thread, I don't mean to go off-topic here...)


EDIT: I see Brandon is too quick for me -- you already found out more info "DVC/DV video codec by Panasonic" is compatible with standard DV as far as I know, so that's probalby played back via Windows Media's Microsoft DV codec... so that's good.

Jose7822


Eratu,

Sure, I can run some tests.  But I think the NTSC DV AVI is about as good as it gets in Sonar.

Tell me which codecs you want me to test.  That would be a better approach. 

Then I'll open up a thread and let you know the results.  How's that?

You are a scholar and a gentleman, Jose! Thank you!

The one I deal with the most is: QuickTime H.264 (HD, or some variant of 16:9 content) at 23.976 fps

But with Sonar, I find I convert over to some other codec via Vegas... often to DV NTSC, but I've tried a few others too. I've never settled in on one codec for Sonar, though. What I don't like about the DV codec is that the file sizes are a bit large -- i.e.: working with large chunks of a film, the DV clips are quite large, far larger than a comparable H.264 clip.

I'd rather stick with 23.976 as well, since it's native to most of the film/video clips I do, but I understand Sonar has issues with that framerate right now, so I've been converting to 29.97.

I'd also rather stick with H.264, but I assume Sonar x64 doesn't work with QuickTime since QuickTime is not x64 yet.... (enlighten me if I'm wrong).

So that means AVI... or WMV... I do like the Windows Media codec, which looks almost as good as H.264 to my eyes, and the file sizes are similarly small. I'd love it if you'd test Windows Media (WMV V11 in Vegas "Render As") and try the 23.976 framerate... if that works well, then I think that would be my preference. If that doesn't work, maybe try WMV V11 NTSC (29.97).

Another option I hope would work is MPEG-4, which is in the same family as H.264.

Anything you check out will be very helpful, Jose. I'll be doing a lot of tests when I set up the Win 7 x64 machine, so we can compare notes when I'm up and running if you want to.

I'm just glad to see how smoothly Brandon's rig was able to play the NTSC clip. That is some good news. :)