48 track editing and Native

[Davey]

Hi,

I'm having some problems with a 48 track EDL using native v6 SP1 on a PC laptop with a fireface 400. The audio stalls and sputters when playing back. I've tried increasing the buffer and tried using a different laptop and still the same thing happens. If I render a section that has been edited, it plays back perfectly. I have noticed that that media was recorded as different takes in single tracks (so 48 files for each take) so I'm not sure whether the rendering as a single interleaved file fixes the problem, or just the fact that there are no edits to deal with. It seems to get stuck at edits but also in the middle of a segment.

Is anyone editng 48 tracks with native on a laptop with success? Has anyone else had this isuue?

Thanks!

David

[avi]

Hi David,
when you render it, what file format are you rendering to?

- If you're rendering as a PMF, then it becomes one large multitrack file, which will play far more smoothly than 48 individual files (or 96 across the edit!)

- If you're rendering as individual files (one file per track) and it works post-render, then that would indicate that it is the edit itself, where double the number of files are being read from the hard disc, that is the issue.

Are you using the laptop's internal drives? They're often at 5400rpm without a large cache; it might be worth trying a faster external drive with a larger cache over firewire.


AVI

[Davey]

Thanks for your response. I'm using a 7200 rpm external drive and the render I did was a single PMF multi-track file (and the original files are also PMF just one file per track). I know that the render plays well so I'm trying to determine whether I need to render all the source material as single multi-track files or whether the edits will still be a problem anyway since the computer is processing twice the number of tracks at edit points. So I thought I'd put this out there in case anyone else has encountered this issue, to possibly save me some time!

David

[phaseboy]

I edit 48+ on my native laptop set-up without problems. I do always use interleaved pmf's however. I have had problems in the past similar to what you describe that were solved with rendering (that was from .wav to interleaved pmf). I have never used one file per track pmf, but I can tell you (that without going to a raid 0 set-up or having files spread across multiple drives) that while I can edit 48+ tracks on native/laptop with a single external drive similar to yours - if I go to individual wave files I would have to deactivate at least half the tracks if not more in order to get things to play without stalling.

On a side note there are a few manufacturers making pretty decent dual-drive external enclosures with built-in Raid 0/1 functionalilty. Not much bigger than the firewire cases of 5 years ago.

[Davey]

Hi Mark,

Thanks. This is good to know. I'm not sure why it was recorded this way, but in the future I'll stick with interleaved files. Glad to hear you have edited so many tracks succesfully on native.

David (Frost)