Project management issues with heavy VST

[mail2sandy42]

Hi All,

Iam Cubase 5 user. I have a 30 min track which has loaded omnisphere, atmosphere, stylus, EastWest, trilogy & reason(rewired). With a Core-Duo processor, i have to freeze & unfreeze every VST when not being used. for a 30min track, every freeze & unfreeze takes lot of time.

I still have lot layers to record and iam finding it very difficult to manage my project. Can anyone suggest me how do i ensure smooth recording without getting the CPU over loaded.

Apart from this, i have few more doubts:
1. Will the quality reduce if i bounce a VST track that has been freezed.
2. Does it make a difference if i dont do "real time" rendering for project which has audio tracks only.
3. Should i bounce all midi to Audio before going for a final mixdown?
4. What are the advantages & disadvantages of bouncing VST track to audio to give a proper mix. Iam very confused if i should mix on the midi itself or should i be bounced to audio.

Thanks in advance for your time.

 

[legionserial]

When I use any MIDI other than my programmed drums, I bounce it to audio to save on the resources. I don't do it with the drums just because there's a lot of work that goes into getting them to sound more realistic and I prefer to do with everything else tracked. Eventually I'll bounce the drums as well, disable all the MIDI tracks, and use just the wav files to mix with. I just find it neater to work with that way. When bouncing I tend to pay a lot of attention to what level it's being bounced at so it fits roughly with the input of levels of the recorded instruments. It usually takes me a while because, barring the drums, I tend to use one instance of SFZ, with a different soundfont in each channel.

There shouldn't be any loss of quality. After all, you're going to mix down the final product to wav anyway in the end. I wouldn't say it's neccessary to bounce all MIDI to audio. Like I say, it depends on how you want to manage your resources and whether you think it's going to be neccessary on a case by case basis.