Yesterday was the first chance I had to give Pro Tools 10 a serious run. While I need more time to give you my complete opinion on the entire package, I figured some of you might be interested in the first impressions.
I’m traveling right now so the setup I’ve used is Pro Tools HD10 on a MacBook Pro, using internal hard drive only. This is the latest MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM, Snow Leopard and a bunch of plugins, including some still in beta. Always trying to keep things Kalashnikov, my sessions are generally on the smallish side, typically 20-30 tracks, sometimes as low as only 8 tracks of audio, at times up to 40-50, but certainly no 200 track boy band productions here.
So far I haven’t made any sessions from scratch with Pro Tools 10, rather I have opened up a few sessions I’m working on. Some examples: one being 12 tracks of sound (with some auxes on top of that) and mainly virtual instruments (Kontakt and Reaktor), another being audio only with slightly more tracks, and a third fairly process-heavy with many plugins and somewhere around 20-30 tracks.
Clip-based gain is a dream to work with… Almost.
I love it already, seriously love it. Like Elastic Time it’s one of those thing that once I’ve start using it there’s no way in Hell I’m going back to working without it. Awesome… Almost. Among the first things I did was select a couple of regions to add some gain to all of them at the same time. No can do. Why not? It seems like such a valuable addition and a no-brainer for a better workflow.
Snappy-happy
Yes, Pro Tools 10 is indeed snappier than it’s predecessors. Even if you don’t think milliseconds will be, or whatever the difference is, I guarantee you it is quite remarkable. Much happy about this improvement.
A nice thing I noticed is that this snappiness is not only when it comes to playback. Simple things like making tracks inactive is also much smoother. Again, you might not think that these small things matter but it does. The overall feel of Pro Tools is just so much better.
So far I haven’t noticed if Pro Tools is more CPU intensive than version 9 or not.
Time to PTX your sessions
Pro Tools 10 uses a new session format, meaning if you open up an older session, do some work and save it, Pro Tools will tell you to save it as a .ptx file rather than .ptf (Pro Tools 7-9 session format). Doing this will mean that you end up with two session files.
Also when you open up your sessions, some recalculating of the waveforms will take place. It’s no biggie, it’s a fast procedure.
Early morning bugs?
Some major upgrades of Pro Tools have been rather bug-ridden to say the least. It’s still too early to say if Pro Tools 10 is or not but I can state for the record that so far I’ve encountered minimal problems.
The only real strangeness I’ve encountered so far.
One thing appeared to be a graphical thing only that occurred during the recalculation of the waveforms. It appears that everything was calculated properly, but some of the clip names were still left and clicking in the box kind of erased the area where I clicked. I just closed the window and continued with the session as normal. No problems.
That’s all for now folks. I’ll be back with more opinions at a later time. So far Pro Tools 10 looks promising. Now I’m off to ProTool.
One last thing, I did get the chance to try out the ‘Export selected tracks to new session’ command today. Worked like a breeze! This feature will be so valuable to some people!
another common one is how to VIs feel on it? Protools has always been a bit behind when it comes to VI stability although 9 was a big leap forward already. Also I heard that while it isn’t 64 bit, plugins can use more ram, I’m guessing something like logic does. hosts them outside the program like a second program. anything like that?
Glad to hear its zippier. I will be picking it up eventually I’m sure.
Dom
Hi Stiff. You can do clip-gain on multiple clips at once. You need the Clip gain line active, then select the clips you want to adjust and drag up or down with the Trimmer. The small Clip Gain icon was specifically designed to work on one clip at a time.
Thanks Stiff. Really liked the 30 answered questions piece too. Yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing more from everyone about how VI’s and other plugs are behaving in 10. SERIOUS drag that sample based instruments can’t load into RAM. That would have been sweet. From what I’m hearing so far, no one has to update RTAS or TDM plugins to get from 9 to 10, as you may have had to do in the past between big upgrades. Aside from AAX.
I meant load into RAM via disk cache of course…
Sturphy, dominic, I’ll report back to you about that.
Simon, you’re right! Though it would be nice to be able directly from the handles…
I’ve noticed that VI’s tend to be much better – but I’ve only been using a smattering of them (No EastWest Play or VSL here). NI Reaktor, Maschine, Akoustik Piano, Razor (which has it’s own issues I won’t go into), as well as Spectrasonics Omnisphere all seem to be far, far more stable. I can run multiple Omnisphere instances! Couldn’t do that before without crashing or some other terrible thing happening.
RTAS plugins in general seem to be much faster. I can run 8 plugins on a track and have only 55 samples of delay! The playback engine setting for utilizing multiple processors also works as expected, now. In PT9, with processors set to 8 at 90%, I’d get CPU errors at around 20% on my CPU meter. I can definitely get it up to a full 85-90% before I get CPU errors, now. Mildly surprising that they’d rework the RTAS engine, with AAX being ‘the future.’
Also, clip gain is wonderful – for those that don’t know ctrl-shift-minus will toggle the clip gain line display on/off, which is already one of my most used key commands.
Thanks Mushoo. Are you using a card? Or non-card… what the hell do you call an “LE” system these days anyway?? It’s not PT Native… because that has a card.. soooo… just PT10? But if I said that, wouldn’t you still wonder? haha
>> “I’ve noticed that VI’s tend to be much better”
I’ll have to look into this (today perhaps). So far I haven’t noticed anything special except I did have the feeling they loaded faster (M-tron Pro in particular) when opening a session. I assumed that had to be attributed to a snappier Pro Tools rather than improvements in the VI area though.
I’ve taken to calling PT10 ‘le’ as PT10 Standard. Though, I have complete toolkit, so I guess I should call it something like PT10 Complete? I still call it LE sometimes, too – everyone still knows what you’re talking about.
Other systems specs I guess you might be interested in: 8-core 3ghz Mac Pro tower with 5gb of RAM. Which will hopefully soon be expanding to 16 GB of RAM as I finally have a worthwhile reason to do it.
Running OSX 10.6.8 with an mBox 2 Pro – which has also gotten a little bit better. In 9 I could barely use the damned thing. If I’d had a firewire drive plugged in, at any point since the last reboot, the mBox would get a buffer underrun. Even if that drive was no longer connected! It’s not nearly that bad anymore, but it can still get a little finicky. Quitting PT, disconnecting and reconnecting the mbox from the firewire bus seems to actually fix it now, though.
Is it weird that one of my favorite things with new versions of PT is finding all the new workarounds?
Screw it, i’ll just keep filling up this post with hopefully helpful information: If your playback suddenly gets ‘scummy’ (noisy, sounds like a mis-sized buffer) – go to your playback engine and toggle away from, and back to, your current buffer size. This’ll clear out the buffer and reset it, and you should be fine for a while.
Also, far as I can tell – DON’T use the Pro Tools Pref and Database Helper app just yet. It seems to cause more trouble than it fixes, with PT10. I tried using it for some random glitch, and I ended up having to reinstall. YMMV though.
Thanks mushoo!
Hello, very good, but you are using a PT10 with toolkit or you have the licence of Pro Tools HD 10 on your iLok, because I have PT9 and I want to upgrade to PT10, but if I buy the toolkit my Pro Tools 10 will open like Pro Tools HD 10 as the first photo of your blog (this page), PTHD10, or if I have the Complete Production Toolkit 2 and Pro Tools 10 licences on same iLok the PT10 will open like PT’10 only?
Thank you a lot.
I like PT10HD so far, however to pick up on the CLIP Based subject. Although you can move multi clip gains up and down together, you can not affect the starting point of each clip. ie. if someone gives you a session with multiple clip gains on one track you can not zero them in one go. This would be useful when receiving a session from other and you want to start again on a track.