It has been a few weeks since the support team from Avid got the purchase problem resolved. I’ve been working on a few scoring projects, so I haven’t had a chance to return to this post. I had a few days this week to do a small project entirely in PT 11, so I can now give my impressions.
First Impressions
My real first impressions long before PT 11 hit. Several years ago, I was discussing Avid with a studio owner. Avid’s stock had recently taken a huge hit. The studio owner likened what was happening with them with the cycle a number of companies went through as they were going out of business (the specific focus was New England Digital in the early 1990s). At the time (2009?) it was hard to be optimistic about any aspect of the economy, but I expressed a hope that Avid would undo the obvious mistakes of the past. In my opinion, this centered around the problems of pursuing a larger market place by expanding into the realm of pro-sumer equipment and software. The trend with publicly traded companies is to focus on the year to year increase of gross sales that drives the stock price rather than increasing profitability while maintaining the portion of the market place they already have.
Pro Tools did one thing well, the thing that put them in so many studios throughout the 1990s: they made a great playground to play in. They didn’t try sell you all the toys to play in the playground, just a place to bring your toys. Acquisitions of Bomb Factory, M-Audio, and Sibelius were disturbing to many of us for this reason. I, for one, doubted that could maintain the playground and make the toys.
The last few years have reinforced to me that Avid is one the right track. They shed the weight of much of their pro-sumer product lines (M-Audio). They have re-focused their development to fixing up the old playground, which was in need of some serious updating, rather than bringing us new toys. Pro Tools 11, to me, represents the culmination of this process.
Most of the important technical aspects have been covered: 64-bit (yes, I know <insert many DAW names> had this since <insert a date>; I don’t care, because I work in Pro Tools!), better audio and video engines, major improvements to metering, and faster-than-realtime bouncing. Back in 2009, if I had made a list of things I wanted to see in Pro Tools, this would be my list (with the exception of offline- bouncing; I usually sum in analog, so I have no need for this).
In short, PT 11 is the upgrade I have wanted for years. No new toys, just a better playground that I can continue to play in for years to come.
As far as some of the other issues I have heard since it was released, I can only say that I have had no problems with iLok or the new iLok License Manager, no problems with 10.3.6 “breaking” after installing PT11, or any other problems. Maybe I’m just lucky, or maybe I just follow installation instructions precisely and uninstall/install in the correct order.
I also was impacted by the CPTK to HD upgrade issue. All I can say is that I cannot really agree with those who argue that we paid over a grand to get CPTK in the first place, to then pay significantly more to maintain those features. My view is that I could have maintained what I had for free; I already had PT10 with CPTK. Nothing was required of me to maintain that setup. I wanted to upgrade to a new version of Pro Tools. That upgrade costs money. I was willing to pay the amount ($599) required because I will need surround in PT11. I make good money from working in Pro Tools. I don’t fault Avid for expecting to be paid.
A Few Details
As I said, I did a small project using VIs , which were printed to audio, and a single DI’d guitar track. For this, I used several Arturia VIs and some drum sounds from Structure*. The mix used most of my standard go-tos (McDSP, Plugin Alliance versions of SPL and Maag).
Initially, I was surprised to see a slightly high resource usage than an identical session in PT 10. That shifted as I added more instances of VIs and plug-ins, when the new audio engine seemed to really shine. I intentionally used somewhat sloppy management of my VIs, running redundant versions of the same plug-in for each part. At the point when I usually start hitting processor and memory errors in PT 10, PT 11 was perfectly happy.
Since it is not a part of my workflow, I had to keep reminding myself about the advanced metering options. To me, metering without control of the type and response of the meter is useless. You never really know if you are seeing a reflection of the audio or the metering process. It is also great to have options for different stages of production. I found myself using peak metering while tracking, and VU when mixing. I can see myself using the K-meters in mix and mastering, but I need to work with them for a bit and get comfortable with them.
The input buffering was also a game changer. I don’t usually track much at my home facility, so I hadn’t thought much about it, the the latency was on par with the HD system at the studio. The system was happy with the buffer cranked down to 64 samples. Since I usually track my guitar parts for film this way at home, I have become accustomed to the frustration and poor musicality one experiences with a lot of latency. It was one of those “ahh” moments of relief when I did my first guitar take and actually felt connected to the music I was playing with.
Summary
I am quite happy with PT 11. I can’t really comment on stability since I’ve only done one project in it, but I am quite happy with the new features.
At this point, I am patiently waiting for my last few go-to plugins to be ported to AAX64. I cannot fully jump into a mixing or mastering project in PT 11 without my UAD plugins, and I can’t really try to score anything without EastWest Play for the orchestral samples, as well as Soundlib’s G-Player, which I use for my old Giga-sampler libraries (Bernard at Soundlib confirmed by email that they will be updating to AAX, though no release timeline).
*I originally wrote that I used Kontakt, not Structure. I ran the SSD samples in Kontakt for a different test in PT10. My mistake.
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