Review: Avid Protools 10
In a market experiencing upgrade fatigue, Avid hopes the version 10 attractions will be game changers.
6 December 2011
Review: Brent Heber
It seems only yesterday that Digidesign was harangued for how long its developers were taking to bring an OSX-compatible version of ProTools to market. A significant time lapse had developed between version 5.1 and 6 and all hell was breaking loose, with forums in a foment: “how dare they make me wait this long” etc. Some years later and the release of ProTools version 10 has had the ‘Tools community up in arms again, declaring the very opposite – “I only just bought PT9!” “What are they thinking releasing this so soon?!” Truth is, in the move to v6, Apple owners couldn’t wait to jump onto OSX and all its multifarious attractions. These days, no one’s doing cartwheels to put their heads into the mouth of (OSX) Lion. I think we’re all a little fatigued by upgrade costs, OS changes and downtime with incompatibility issues. In other words, the prevailing sentiment is… please, not another big upgrade.
The cost of this upgrade has certainly been a big point of contention. Avid has released the PT10HD upgrade at prices never seen before – the upgrade scale runs as high as US$2500 for a move from PT7HD to PT10HD, down to $999 for PT9HD owners. Historically, an HD upgrade has been around the US$350 mark, so clearly Avid was bracing itself for an inevitable backlash. And they got one. In response, the Avid Audio division recently extended an olive branch (onto the fire?) by offering the recently upgraded PT9 owners a discounted US$599 upgrade path via an ‘Avid Vantage’ support contract.
So the (metaphorical) $64,000 upgrade question is: “Is it worth it?”. The answer is ‘yes’, although not a totally unqualified ‘yes’. Regardless, let’s explore the big ticket additions and you can make up your own mind. These include: Clip gain, real-time fades, 32-bit floating point and interleaved file support, Audiosuite improvements, a Disk Cache feature and an improved plug-in architecture for 64-bit compliance down the track – a handful of these new AAX plug-ins are included with the upgrade.
DISK CACHE
The two most important features in that aforementioned list are real-time fades and disk cache. By removing the need to render fades as new audio files, opening and closing sessions is much faster and writing a fade across a huge multitrack session is near instantaneous. ProTools has always used a RAM buffer to read audio files off your hard drive – it’s a setting in your Playback Engine window. With ProTools 10 that segment of code now runs 64-bit (although the application is still 32-bit) as it can access almost all your installed RAM to store the audio on your timeline. I say ‘almost’ as the software will need 3GB to run, so on an HD-licensed system with 12GB of RAM you can set your disk cache to a maximum of 9GB. If you do, then up to 9GB of audio from your Edit window and Region bin (now called ‘Clip Bin’) will be stored in RAM and played back from there as if from a solid state drive, with, again, near instantaneous playback regardless of edit density and track depth. This feature was developed so PT10 could cope with up to 768 tracks in a maxed out (soon to be released) three-card HDX system, and also means ProTools will play off almost any network volume (I recorded eight tracks to a network share over wi-fi!).
FILE SUPPORT RETHINK
While overhauling the way ProTools relates to hard drives and fades Avid has also reapproached the file types that ProTools natively supports. PT10 will allow files of mixed bit depths to co-exist and playback from the timeline without conversion, and will also support playback of interleaved files without splitting them into their mono channels. This drastically speeds up import times – simply update the wave cache (the file that stores the graphical overview of the waveform) and you’re good to go. Consequently, whether you’re a sound designer bringing in SFX or a musician loading bundles of loops and beats, each time you drag a file in you’ll get to playback much faster. 32-bit audio files and the RF64 file format is also supported, allowing for greater headroom and much longer record times (the RF64 wave file does away with the 4GB file limit imposed in earlier versions).
NEED TO KNOW
(above) With an HD licensed system, Clip gain can be freely interchanged with your volume automation
(above) Session Setup window with the ability to change bit depths and interleaved status on the fly
(right) PT10 also features new signal flow interrogation modes previously only available with an ICON
CLIP GAIN
Clip Gain isn’t a DAW revelation – Nuendo has had similar functionality for some years now. At its essence, you get ±36dB gain adjustment in real time on the audio clip (a ‘Region’ now = ‘Clip’) which is both very fast to visually adjust for quick ’n’ easy gain matching and has the benefit of being independent of the volume automation graph (although the two are related).
Any clip gain processing is done pre-insert, whereas volume graphing is post-insert. The only way to achieve pre-insert gain adjustments in the past was to insert a trim or time adjuster plug-in and automate it, which could lead to automation lag on playback and was generally a cumbersome approach. Sample-accurate clip gain can be nudged from the keyboard with modifiers and the up/down arrows, and you can also show a clip gain line for flexible adjustment mid-clip.
This separation of clip gain from the volume playlist also helps mixers who will now start with a fresh clean volume line, rather than dealing with editors’ squiggles! Region groups have been updated to ‘Clip Groups’ and now gain levels will remain with the groups as they move from ProTools session to session.
ProTools 10 files will now bear a PTX extension, as opposed to earlier PTF files. This is to accommodate the new fade and file structures, however, it means to collaborate with studios on earlier releases you will need to do a “Save Copy In” and lose your separate clip gain vs volume automation. Some niggles well inevitably result.
AUDIOSWEET
Another big area that has been overhauled is the Audiosuite/rendered processing. You can now open multiple Audiosuite windows at once and if you select ‘Clip by Clip’ and ‘Individual Files’ you can retain your fades and handles when rendering effects. If you wish, you can even opt to apply an Audiosuite process to a whole file, even when only a snippet is visible on the timeline – so you never have problems un-trimming again. Windows configurations can be used to store multiple Audiosuite windows being open at once and will also store the settings of the plug-ins and recall them at the same time. This is potentially a massive timesaver for folks who need to render effects in order to pass projects around between studios/rooms.
MIX ADVANTAGE
Up to this point, you can see that keyboard and mouse editors will get solid improvements in how they approach their work in 10 – what about the mixers out there? The biggest deal on that front will be the adoption of a new plug-in format: Avid Audio eXchange or AAX. The key move here is in making the ProTools proprietary plug-in world 64-bit to access more RAM.
And here’s where the composers amongst you should be sitting up and paying attention – the other stuff may not have been floating your boat so much but a true 64-bit application with access to greater than 4GB of RAM will make a huge difference. The very fact you can load all your samples into affordable RAM is a big improvement and AAX as a format will allow this sort of development to occur. But for now we have the transition to deal with…
ProTools 10 allows for RTAS, TDM and AAX plug-ins to all coexist, but Avid has warned that the next major release will drop support for RTAS and TDM. Clearly, there’s going to be some financial pain here, as third-party plug-in developers move in for the upgrade ‘kill’.
Avid Channelstrip showing its Average/Peak detection modes and the selectable gain structure.
CHANNELSTRIP
Included in this release are the first few AAX plug-ins: Mod-delay III, Downmixer and Channelstrip. Mod-Delay is an update of an established Digirack plug-in, but Downmixer and Channelstrip are new additions.
Downmixer allows editors in stereo rooms to monitor sessions that are routed in 5.1 or even 7.1. Previously this would have been a third-party plug-in bundled with Complete Production Toolkit, now it’s included with an HD license as standard.
Channelstrip is quite an addition, containing the DNA of the EQ and dynamics section of Euphonix’s flagship System 5 mixing console. I say ‘DNA’ because it’s not so much an emulation as it is a stem cell ‘clone’. There’s input and output trims, some versatile filters, a solid EQ and a very interesting dynamics section. Any of the four components can be bypassed from the FX Chain view at the top of the plug-in and clicking on the context menu allows you to reconfigure the signal flow within the channel, exactly as you would on a System 5.
As someone who works on an Icon mixer I have a few gripes with how ChannelStrip maps onto the Icon control surface, but when it comes to the sound I have no complaints. The compressor is extremely transparent on first use, but then you realise it’s because of its attack time behaviour – if you open the Sidechain page you can switch between Average compression and Peak compression, and by default it’s set to Average, unlike most compressors. Hence, it lets through many peaks which gives a lot of air to the resultant signal. Also, don’t expect this compressor to act as a brickwall limiter, as it doesn’t have the ability to look ahead “because the System 5 console doesn’t work like that”. In my opinion I think this is taking the ‘faithful recreation’ approach too far. If I was Avid I’d want ProTools users (accustomed to look-ahead ability) with no experience of the System 5 to be blown away in every respect. Instead, I’ve found myself reaching for other limiters alongside Channelstrip as its fastest attack speed seems to max out at 15ms.
THE SHAKEDOWN
It’s much faster on big sessions in all the ways that have frustrated me in the past and I appreciate the increased trackcount, better workflows and new plug-ins. This release definitely has more of a post-production focus compared to the more music-centric release of ProTools 8 (with all its MIDI functionality). It’s also a relief to see Avid moving towards 64 bit (albeit slowly) with its AAX plug-in format but is this a ground-breaking, innovative release? Not really. It’s more an evolution of a system based on customer feedback and competitive pressure over many years. That said, it’s certainly nice to see they listen to our feedback even if it takes a bit of time to get to market! So how does it all shake down? I’m happy as a pig in muck on ProTools 10.
RESPONSES