Vegas 8a Audio Multi-Track Recording

fldave wrote on 2/24/2008, 2:18 PM
My main question pertains to 24/96 vs. 24/48.

I have a new Presonus FP10 (old Firepod) and am putting it through stress testing prior to a shoot of an acoustic concert. I'll be getting a stereo mix from the mixer as well as some feeds from a mic and three guitars. I will be focusing on the video part mostly, a couple of audio people will be manning the sound part.

I am running the FP10 (firewire) into a dual core Gateway laptop (not Core 2 Duo) running Vegas 8a. All seems working fine after I have been testing it a bit. My laptop got flakey after an accidental powerdown with settings at 24/96, but a restart of Vegas solved that. 100GB free disc space on the laptop. I am running the FP10 ASIO drivers, although I did download and install the ASIO4ALL drivers just in case. Vegas seems very nice and solid

The shoot will be an FX1 with two HC7s, so it would be nice to go to Blue Ray in the future, strictly SD now.

One of the main sound guys will also capture (redundant) from the Mackie 1640 to his computer, but he said he usually captures at 24/44 (?) since he is not in the DVD world, just CDs. I told him I needed at least 24/48, and he said that he could not reliably do 24/96 using the supplied software that came with the Mackie. I think his problem is he is not using Vegas!

Will 96Khz give me that much more benefit vs 48Khz weighed against any throughput risks I may encounter? FP10 runs 8 line/mic inputs. Also consider my desire to go to BluRay in the future with this.

Any comments and horror stories welcome!

Edited:
Another question I meant to mention was is it safe to run the recording straight through, or is it safer to stop say between main show/encore or more frequently ( remember we have redundant audio captures) as there will be sections of talking like in a Storytellers show.

Comments

pwppch wrote on 2/24/2008, 7:38 PM
I many cases the biggest thing you have to concern your self with is disk through put. Can your harddrive keep up? If you are recording a lot of tracks at high sample rates the data rate can be significant. How well does your drive keep up and what happens when it is overloaded? Does it buffer gracefully or does it stall the machine down - i.e. block audio hardware interrupts there by causing lost input data.

Turn off Write caching on your harddrives also. You wouldn't want to loose what you recorded incase of a hardware problem/crash. Even though it crashed vegas writes out the files constantly so that you can at least recover what you recorded.

The other thing to do is to increase your ASIO hardware driver latency. For recording you really don't need super low latencies. A sample frame size of 1024 should be considered. Even if you are input monitoring for sanity checking, the delay would be bearable, as long as it is for reference. Still, you'd be better off using the typical hardware supplied mixer tool to build a monitor check.

Turn off all extra stuff. Turn you laptop into a glorfied ADAT machine. No fancy stuff. Don't check your email. Don't browse the web. Don't do anything but use it for recording while you are recording.

Other than these things, you should be able to record live multitrack with Vegas with no problems.

Peter

fldave wrote on 2/24/2008, 8:48 PM
Thanks Peter. My test tonight was with 8 tracks 24/96 for 1hour 45 minutes. No issues, when I stop the master recording, I cancel out of the peak building and the system releases me to continue with my intended processing.

This test was with all the other extra Vista crap running , be assured that I will kill all extra processes when the time cones.

Thanks again!

Dave