Degradation from re-rendering final mix?

[PTravel]

In another thread, I described problems I'm having with inadequate buffering for a huge project. A suggestion was made to break up the piece into sections. Unfortunately, there's no way to do that -- the music is continuous throughout all 8 minutes of the material.

How about this?

Do an interim mix of the instruments and render down to a stereo instrument master.
Import the instrument master and mix all vocals against that.
Then do another interim mix of just the vocals and render down to a vocal master.
Then do a final mix from the two stereo interim mixes.

Will there be significant degradation from rendering twice, once to the interim mix and once to the final?

 

[ashcat_lt]

I do it all the time. Got in the habit back in the day of 66MHz and 8M of RAM...

Some DAWs have a sort of "fast bounce" or slightly lower quality "working render" kind of thing. Avoid that, and render your stems at the full resolution and sample rate of the project just like you would with the final mix and you will have no generation loss at all. I suggest keeping separate project files for the mixes so you can go back if absolutely necessary.