Agreed to Disagree with Protools guy [message #86653] |
Thu, 14 June 2007 20:13 |
Rod Lincoln
Messages: 883 Registered: September 2005
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Senior Member |
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I went over the Protools mix guy's studio yesterday to hear the mixes of the
project that I played on. He mentioned again that I was cutting too hot.
We got into a friendly disagreement about the subject. He said he would always
gain down the track (basically rendering it and doing a gain reduction) if
it was that hot because the plugs wouldn't have any headroom to work. (I
noticed he was using UAD stuff)I asked about inserting a plug with more headroom
before the offending plug to adjust level that way, and he was pretty opinionated
that that would affect the sonic quality in a bad way. He's a good guy, so
in the interest of not wasting the artist's time who invited me, I just let
it drop. The mixes sounded pretty good though. Although very low in level.
He's hip to the summing buss in protools choking if you push it too hard.
It will just have to be made up in mastering. Opinions???
Rod
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Re: Agreed to Disagree with Protools guy [message #86748 is a reply to message #86688] |
Sat, 16 June 2007 10:49 |
"Kris" .
Messages: 27 Registered: June 2006
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Junior Member |
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Sure, a 32 bit float (and also 64 bit float) will have lots of headroom, but
it makes for mixes that clip the 2-buss instead of clipping at the faders.
You can't 'play the console' with this kind of structure like you can with
a mixer that has limited headroom at the faders (like Paris and its integer
based buss). What you see as a limitation, I see as an advantage, and vice
versa...
What you lose with the high headroom 2-buss is variation in clip point...a
high headroom 2-buss will only clip at one spot, where you've set the master
fader to. It's nice to be able to clip a channel using the EQ trim, then
run the fader down a bit, using the trim/clip as a bit of a limiter/level
control. This means that all your tracks clip at different points relating
to their fader settings, which is harder to perceive as clipping per-se since
it sounds more musical in a mix. To do this on a floating pt system you'd
need to add a saturation pluggin.
Cheers
Kris
"John" <no@no.com> wrote:
>
>Sure, a common problem in the summing busses is clipping at the master bus
>when you mix many tracks. You can find this point by getting a sine wave
>(like these http://www.rme-audio.com/english/download/audtest.htm) and putting
>the sine wave on each track all in phase.
>
>This way the peaks of all tracks are at the same point. So you have all
>these tracks at 0db and you find that they will often clip the master bus
>if you have more than 1 at 0db and so you have to pull the fader back on
>each track to avoid clipping.
>
>You will find that for 8 tracks you may have to be down 20 db to not clip
>on the master bus. Real music doesn't have all channels at the peak 0dB
>at the same time so it's a more extreme test but using this you can find
>where your master clips.
>
>In cubase if you do 32 bit float projects there is so much headroom you
can
>clip the crap out of the input to the master (light design to go on at 0db)
>and it will still not clip the signal. Every DAW is different. In Paris
>0db has some headroom so you can go above that my a few db and not get a
>nasty clip.
>
>In cubase you can monitor the master fader pre fader or post fader. If
you
>monitor prefader you will see the clip light at 0dB even though it doesn't
>clip the signal and you have tons of headroom. If you render/bounce this
>"clipped" signal to disk though it WILL be clipped. The trick in cubase
>(and I think it's awesome) is you monitor the Master POST fader and simply
>pull down the fader so it's not clipping, render/bounce and you're done.
>
>You can have cubase clipping the crap out of the master fader Pre fader
and
>it's no problem and you don't have to pull your faders back down because
>of the 32 bit headroom. Most people DON'T understand this point about Cubase.
> In Paris you have a nice feature where it will warm any clipping but you
>have a limited headroom so you need to make sure not to clip on your faders
>as a rule.
>
>John
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