Composer Template SHOWDOWN on Mac Studio
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- čas přidán 18. 09. 2023
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My interview and mini-golf battle with Zach and Leo, composers of “Cobra Kai” and “Weird: The Al Yankovich Story:”
• Out of the Studio - Za...
Get ready for the ultimate comparison. VEPro vs Disabled Track Template. I'm testing composer templates using Cubase 12, Kontakt, Sine Player, Abbey Road Orchestra running with and without Vienna Ensemble Pro to determine what's the fastest workflow for big film and media composer templates.
Vienna Ensemble Pro. Should I use it or not? For many years, this has been the big debate for composers. But the question now is, are these new Apple Silicon Macs fast enough to make a disabled track workflow a viable option for film composers? The only way to find out was to build the best possible VEPro template and the best possible Disabled Track Template and to run benchmarks on the two.
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About David Kudell:
David Kudell is an LA-based music composer for film & TV. He is well known for being selected by JJ Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and Ramin Djawadi out of 11,000 composers as the winner of the “Spitfire scoring competition” to score a scene from the HBO show Westworld in 2020. His groundbreaking score shook up the composer community with its wholly original take on the scene, and instantly made David a household name among fellow composers.
As a composer, David has shown his ability to write music in a broad variety of styles and genres for film & TV. As part of composer Anne-Kathrin Dern's team, he recently contributed music to the Netflix film "The Claus Family 2," the gothic thriller film "Devil,” and romantic thriller “Have. Hold. Take.”
His album "Reel One," a collection of original themes for film and TV, is now available on all streaming platforms.
In addition, he has written music and sample library demos for the premiere sample library companies Orchestral Tools and Native Instruments.
Born and raised in Southern California, David graduated with a Master's Degree in Film & Television Production from San Diego State University in 2000. After graduation, he worked in the post-production sound department on over 25 Hollywood films, including Black Hawk Down, Mission Impossible 3, and Kill Bill. He is also an accomplished video director, having filmed and produced hundreds of commercials at his company Rimrock Creative Media.
His background as a video director has led to his current success as a music composer, as his understanding of the filmmaking process gives him a film director's perspective on the best use of music to tell the story.
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Great service to the community. A lot of work went into this.
for real. i appreciate vids like this. there are so little of them for the community
What. Are. Those. Colors??? Have I taught you nothing? Woodwinds MUST be poopy brown! 😂
How did they let you in the Academy with brown woodwinds? 🤷♂️
@@DavidKudellMusic 💩💩💩 This is the way. 💩💩💩
Oh no.brown is a strings and yellow is the woodwinds 😂
hahhahahahaha. that was the best .. . ( love your channel as well! and the gooeis you sll on BMAC). Thx to both of you for helping me navigate the early beginning of my (paid working) synch, film and tv career...from doing electronic music. it's such a relief. Thank you again!
These two videos are so helpful, thanks!
Great video, again 🙂 Thanks for testing it out and sharing your results
thanks for all this hard work!
Thanks for this. I was a VEPro user for years until I bought the Mac Studio. Then I went all DAW (Logic) without VEPro, because didn't want to waste all that untapped speed and power by working in Rosetta mode. Now that it is Silicon native, I'm also finding that the hybrid approach works great for the reasons that you so capably explained.
Really interesting David. Thanks for taking the time to do this!
My pleasure!
This is super helpful to have someone as knowledgable as you make this video-I'm super sick of all the people who say, "Oh, the Mac Studio can play X amount of Logic tracks in the Logic Benchmark. And it takes X amount of time to load the Logic Benchmark." NOOO!! The "Logic Benchmark," whatever that is, is absolute crap! This is actually REAL STUFF! Thank you!
Glad it was helpful. Those benchmarks are relatively easy to run, that's why you see them. You just have to duplicate a bunch of tracks. Let's just say I'm not planning on doing any more benchmarking for a long time.
Regarding the save time of the disabled template, I decided to try removing the Kontakt instances from the template and have only Sine instruments. The save time dropped from 12 seconds to 2 seconds. The file size dropped from 293MB to 105MB for 704 tracks. So if you want to do a disabled template and have fast save and load times, Sine is the way to go.
Wow fascinating. I wish NI would consider optimizing kontakt so it didn’t balloon DAW files with huge file sizes
Yes but it seems to me that Signe is more RAM intensive than Kontakt 7 or Opus because there is no option to unload the RAM of all instances
Morning,
I know this is off the cuff, but I was wondering if you could explain the differences between the four Devastator libraries from Keep Forest.
I saw your posts on a music forum about them and I’m still left wondering what the point of owning any of them past the latest Breakout Pro would be, as they all sound so redundant and samey.. I figure the latest and greatest would be the only one worth having, yes/no?
Also, did you pay full price or did they have a sale: I’m having hell finding much info about this company online and it’s frustrating.
Care to shed any light or information as it’s greatly appreciated!!
Thank you
Thanks David! It is awesome that someone with the actual "know" has taken the time to do this.
Thanks for your time making this! Im constantly going a bit back and forth between DAW or VEP. Also settled on a hybrid approcah! Good video quality btw! 😊
Super helpful! I’m moving from a 2010 MacPro to a Mac Studio M2 Ultra. I’m really liking the idea of a hybrid setup. Thanks for including the bit in buffer settings- that was stymying me to no end!
Great video, David! Thank you :)
THIS IS SO HELPFUL! THANK YOU
Wow! This comparison was really interesting to watch! I was always curious about this, since I also use VEPro and Cubase a ton. Great work David!
Glad it was helpful!
David, thanks so much!
Fantastic video!
Awesome video! I was just thinking about that since another composer friend mentioned about the disable tracks function.
Nice job David. I to use VE Pro, and I recently purchased a M2 Mac mini. I’m amazed at how much easier and quicker it is to load tracks and to create using the new M2 Mac mini. I still use a hybrid approach as well, but I notice it’s just easier to just use my disable tracks that are growing as my template grows. Thanks again for the contact. Well done.
Great video! Thank you for taking the time to go in depth like this, you'll save a lot of people a lot of time.
I actually switched to a disabled track template about a year ago, and found the same things you did. I'm ultimately happier with the disabled track template. Though it can be bothersome when auto-saves pause my workflow for 10 seconds ever 5 minutes, I've learned to take those few seconds to stretch and look away from the screens (which I've noticed keeps my eyes from looking so red at the end of a long work day).
But I think I'll try out a hybrid, as you suggested at the end! I'll try running my essentials through VEPro, then fill in the rest with disabled tracks.
Awesome, yes the nice thing is you can just start with one or two instrument groups at the beginning, like moving just strings or woodwinds to VEP and see how you're liking it.
Great vid David! I really appreciate how deep you go with your testing and curiosity. You are answering a lot of questions I had myself and I bet the community agrees. I am kind of exactly in between 2 worlds like you, however I really do like VEP and kind of enjoy the complexity and grand approach. I always pre-mix, stage, set mic-positions and prepare every instrument in VEP before it goes into Cubase so I don't have to do a lot of mixing after. It's more of tweaking the mix busses a little. There are absolutely pros and cons to the 2 approaches, and ultimately we have to decide for ourselves. However I personally don't think that the buffer and latency is even a problem anymore, since you can already go so low. The one thing that really annoys me with the local disabled approach is the large file sizes. My disabled template with around 1500 tracks was over 700mb, so every day I had to delete tons of autosaves. WIth VEP this is not a problem and I feel that Cubase is always more snappy with MIDI-channels over instrument tracks. I'm very curious about Cubase 13 and if the new version is going to affect the two approaches..?
Until next time,
John
Thank You. I just do different things, but it helped to assess Logic + FCP, USB + Thunderbolt usage. I think in 2024 waiting for M4 (new ARM-Core-Version) - bigger RAM (and stick with 1TB SSD - no endless budget).
Great videos ! I switched to Mac Studio 64 Go RAM in February and my composing life is so much easier for one big point that you also mentioned at the beginning of the first video : Noise ! I can now work with speakers and open headsets without these horrible fan noises. Otherwise, I have my classic orchestra on VEP template, and everything else is added on the flow.
This is such a detailed take on a niche topic. You've definitely earned my like/sub 👍
Also another thing I have set up is my big self contained template with all instrument tracks deleted. It only has all my bussing layers which is complex. But I saved different groupings of my instrument tracks as track archives and only add what I want for that particular cue.
Great video again
hahaha the autosave pause really resonated for me
2:16 YES! The purge all instances feature was the reason I rebuilt my whole template with Kontakt 7, totally worth the time! I appreciate the amount of work you put into this, David :)
Great video! I appreciate your effort, I’m sure that stuff took forever to do. I’m blessed to have one of these Mac systems so I use a disabled track template. No need to learn another system and do all that because for me, when I start to complicate things, I realize I make a lot less music.
Plus I took auto save off and made it a key command. I press it every time I do a new action.
Great video on this topic.
I had 2 VEP slaves (Mac Pros 5.1) at the beginning of last year and switched to a Mac Studio and asked myself the same question.
Currently I have a Cubase template, but will also create a local VEP template in addition.
Since my computer doesn't run 24/7 and I don't get to work on my music every day, a local Cubase template seemed to make more sense to me.
On the other hand, I am used to the VEP workflow and have learned to appreciate the possibility to load everything into VEP once and access it at any time.
You threw the right word in the room: Hybrid!
Amazing video series! Thank you for investing the considerable time putting this together. I’m a long time sometimes frustrated VEP user… If I can ask an off topic question, how do you get 3 monitors hooked up? Are you using up a couple of thunderbolt ports?
Thank you
Great stuff, as usual! I always save while I'm listening back to a cue. That way I'm not wasting time while I'm waiting for Cubase to save.
Thanks David! I feel this Mac Studio can handle everything. As far I can see you don’t use any VSL libraries but I can guess this would be pretty much the same result. I read on a comment that you manage videos on the same Mac, so actually this is just 1 computer for everything… And that will dramatically simplify my/our workflow!
Thank you so much for another practical and useful video. If you happen to have Logic, that would be super nice to compare the scores, especially the track disable template.
Fantastic video and pretty much confirms that an M2 Ultra really is the way to go at the moment. Thank you so much!
Wonderful video and thanks for taking time to do this. Just want confirm, you didn't load Cinematic Studio into Sine Player, right?? Seems like that was the implication when you moved the stuff over to the Sine Player. So, I am assuming you were just referring to the Orchestral tool Kontakt version tot the Sine Player version.
Again, that's for this. I can't wait to see how the forthcoming M4 macstudios are going to blow the roof off.
This is super fascinating. For me VEPRO has never really worked the way I wanted it to. I didn’t realize that I would have to sacrifice a low buffer size, which is really a no go for me. I’m not an orchestral composer, but I use a lot of orchestral libraries, so I thought it would be the way to go. I believe now it’s simply not worth the increased latency, and really it’s not something I have to have. I will setup a disabled track template I think. Thanks so much!
Setting up a mixture of both now. Using Disabled tracks to turn VEP instruments On and Off as they are needed. This way I can have lots of instruments routed and set up, with very little overhead in RAM and project files size.
Nice video David. If you haven't done so, I'd recommend looking into and experimenting with Expression Maps via Art Conductor. Doing so allows you to cut down all those articulations tracks for any given instrument into a single Key Switch or Multi-Instrument instance which saves time, CPU load, and RAM usage. With the proper expression map assigned in Cubase for the instance, all you have to do to change any note's articulation is highlight the note and select the articulation you want from the drop-down menu in Cubase's piano roll. No writing in MIDI notes, or hitting them as you record. Just highlight and assign.
This can also help with mixing since you can manually enter expression map data if the default KS/Multi files aren't to your liking. This way you could, if you wanted, create three KS/Multi instances (just duplicate the first one) and assign the Short articulations to one of them, Long articulations to another, and then maybe the Misc/FX articulations/techniques to the third track. Now you have only three tracks, but still all of the articulations you could ever want for that instrument which is much better than having to navigate nearly a dozen tracks for one instrument and its articulations.
Using this method brought what used to be a 1,560+ track template down to 400 tracks or fewer for me, project depending. As I said before it saves time, space, CPU load, and RAM usage.
Best of luck, and happy composing!
@TWDub thanks for the helpful tip. A few of my composer friends also use this method and they have recommended it to me. It's something I might explore in the future. But I shudder to think of having to redo both my Cubase and VEPro template plus add the expression maps! But I might try a single library and see if I like it.
Thank you so much for doing this, David! This is invaluable!
The difference is getting smaller and smaller, no doubt. On my older system where I used VE Pro locally, it was a godsend. I would still add local disabled tracks as required. I still think I'll use that hybrid approach simply because it keeps a lot of my workflow common across different projects (read cues)...switching between them just seems to have gotten a lot easier.
I'm still torn between a 96GB M2 MAX MBPro and a 192GB M2 Ultra Mac Studio. The portability and flexibility of the MBPro still seems like a worthy trade-off. Thoughts?
96 is plenty for disabled track workflow. For VEPro, it would work but only 1-2 libraries of each type (strings, brass, perc, etc)
I too am a compulsive saver but I do it manually not auto save (gives me a better answer to someone's question yesterday on a forum why I do manual saves instead of auto saves).. I too was surprised that disabled tracks load and save didn't take longer...
Great video and again appreciate the real-world example for composers. I recently got a Mac Studio Max (64GB) and am using a VEPro template with 76 channels including reverbs and summing busses and a number of gain plugins for some channels. I'm using it primarily with Dorico but the thought is I could jump between Dorico and my DAW if I set up a DAW template identically. Anyway it runs even fuller polyphony sections without any pops at 256 samples and 2 buffers with VEPro. Granted I don't tend to play stuff in but I do record CC1 in realtime. I am at a point where adding Kontakt instances causes VEPro to crash due to high memory pressure so may need to investigate the purge samples you demonstrated.
Also try lowering the DFD buffer to 6kb, which should lower RAM usage a lot
@@DavidKudellMusic wow that did work. between purging samples and moving disk buffering down it more than cut ram pressure in half. Thanks!
Awesome Video! I still use a 1800 disabled track template on an 11 years old Core I7 extreme with only 24gb of ram…it works awesome but auto saving is a big PITA to be honest. Freezing tracks is a little time consuming as well. But controlled with an I pad and lemur it’s manageable 😊
Disabled tracks over here. Only becomes an issue when I am in deep with a deadline and need to jump between cues quickly for fixes or small changes. I have a a streamdeck command for show all tracks, show active tracks and show tracks with events. That way I can see active tracks not in use but turned on in a big template of over 1000 tracks and get rid of them quickly. Thanks to PoudSound for that little tip. Cool video! Thanks for doing it
I already switched to a single Mac studio solution from a master and slave system quite a while ago. Never touched Vepro since then again. in a way, it was a painful decision because hours of work went into the creation and administration of the server system. But now I am so happy with what I have…
Would love to see if Logic / Cubase made any difference too!
Best video on this subject! I'm on PC, but the benchmarks should be similar.
Thank you, and definitely the tests apply to PC as well for the most part!
Thanks David!!! This is soooo useful. I have one question though. How do you handle the picture in your setup? Do you import it directly into Cubase, or use PT or videoslave? How does that affect the performance of the Mac?
Glad it was helpful. I just import the picture into Cubase. It doesn't affect the performance at all, these Macs can play like 15 stream of 8K ProRes video, which is 2,314 times the number of pixels of an HD video.
Thanks for the video, great service.
If you can, please enable subtitles.
Added
Really good videmo man
That auto save looks super anoying hahahaha
long ago I moved from my intel MacBook Pro to the first Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and is totally a Game Changer XD
Hi David great channel sp now I am one of your followers! :-) I am a bit confused on what to get... I make House music and want to get a Mac Studio of some sort! The M1 version has dropped a bit here in Denmark and I am not sure if it is to much to get the M2 Version ? We are talking either the Mac studio M1 OR M2 Max! I do nout big libraries but do use some plugins.. It seems like most people say 64gb ram and 1tb ssd ? Also live how good Cubase looks on your Dell Widescreen :-) may I ask what model it is ?
Since you’re probably doing more soft synths instead of samples, the higher single core score of M2 Max over M1 Max would be worth it. 64GB of RAM should be plenty if you’re not doing orchestral music.
Hybrid setup here as well. Plus Track Archives (Cubase)
Would love to see you test AudioGridder.
What is that?
Hi, thanks very much for this truly informative video. I'm currently using VEPro on 2 Mac Pros (Trash can and tower). I'm ready to make the switch for a mac studio. My question is : what happens if you have to open older sessions that were distributed over VEPro with 2 computers ? Could I get away with buying 2 M2Max instead of only 1 M2Ultra. That way I could keep and upgrade my configuration, and smoothly switch to hybrid workflow . What do you think ?
Extremely helpful. I'm between building a new PC and buying one of these. I really don't want to give Apple any money, but you're making it tempting.
I'm not sure if you've said it already, but where do you store your instruments and projects? Internal, thunderbolt nvme enclosures, or 2.5" SSDs?
Check out my other recent video about the Mac Studio - I talk all about storage in that one.
Hi David I wonder if you have some comments to the problems with routing in Cubase using MIDI tracks instead of Instrument tracks? I love to have the instrument tracks because of the simplified routing. In Studio One you have a kind of Midi track pointing to a VI - local or on a VEPro server - and STILL have the link so when you select the track in the arrangement you select the corresponding fader in the mixer. Using a VEPro server most effective means a set-up of a small number of instances with a lot of instruments in each and the routing is pretty complex. How do you deal with that?
Hi @David, great video! Lots of helpful informations. I just bought a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 128 Gb of memory, loading many tracks is no problem of course, but audio playback is far from optimal, and not comparable to your test unfortunately. Both with or without Vienna I can barely play back 65-ish tracks (orchestral vsts in kontakt 7, the usual ones most of us use).
I keep having drops and clicks, I was wondering if you could give some advice to spot the problem? It's not the ram, it seems the cores are not being evenly used, and I get ASIO metering CPU clipping, while DISK stays low. It improves a bit with Vienna, but still, not doing justice to the potential of an M2 Ultra.....any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Something is not right there, that shouldn't be happening. Probably a software issue of some sort, or specific instruments. The only way to tell is to try to isolate the issue by trying certain instruments or turning off certain tracks until the problem goes away so you can try to isolate the instrument. It could also be audio drivers, not sure.
I don't know if that could partecipate to the issues, but my Apogee Quartet seems glitchy and often disconnects since running on Silicon. By the way distribution of libraries over more kontakt istances by using vienna seems to solve the problem for now. Thanks for your help!@@DavidKudellMusic
I’m all for saving time even if i get stuck writing a cue lol. I’m all disabled template and addicted to adding whatever processing i want to instrument tracks
Hey David, do you load your VEP project with the samples loaded? I have my VEP loaded with samples purged and it loads up pretty quickly
What preload buffer size are you using in Kontakt?
How do you zoom in when you screencast?
thanks for the video. What do you think I should buy if my project consists no more than 25-30 tracks (VST instruments & Audio) Mac mini or it's better to save for Mac Studio? Thanks!
So that’s tough to answer because I don’t know what the load will be for those tracks. Every software instrument is different and even some Kontakt instruments use way more power than others (Slate + Ash Kontakt instruments for example use tons of CPU). I also haven’t kept up on what the Mac Minis are these days. One option I suppose is to try the Mac Mini and purchase it where you can return it within 14 days if it can’t handle what you need.
Another thing to save time on save and session size is save each track as a track preset then remove instrument and disable.
So when you want o use a track
1 enable it 2 load track preset.
This is not good for tracks you have in surround. Meaning more than one stereo output of contact. Because for some reason the second stereo out of Kontakt in your mixer doesn’t get assigned correct when recalling. This method cut my template size from 1.7 gigs to around 500 mb. I couldn’t do with much of the instruments because they are making use of surround.
Hi, may i know did you disable Asio guard in cubase or VEPro plugins in cubase? and how many thread u assigned for each instances in VEPro? Thanks
Yes disabled Asio and I think 3-4 threads maybe?
@@DavidKudellMusicthank u ❤
My M2 Studio experience with VEPro7. Installed worked on setting up instruments, Crash...... Ok one more chance......Crash!
Went back to loading instruments individually without using VEPro7 and no issues, besides one Cubase 12 bug.
My theory is, that it is more important to use less third party programs to achieve the same goal.
The only way VEPro7 can compete is to create their own daw and avoid being a leech that creates more reasons for why your system may crash.
Some may counter and say, "But i've had no crashes".
Good for you, Im not a beta tester, I am a music producer.
Just like a race car driver:
Get in car
Turn on Ignition
Shift
Press gas
GO!
Was your VEPro native or running under Rosetta translation?
@@tronam Native (Recent updates)
Dont get me wrong I love the concept of VEPro, but again its another device used to get to the same destination of one device.
If there were no crashes would I need VEPro7 with my M2 Max studio?
No.
Turn off two. Spitfire BBC Orchestra Pro sells all mic positions, including Atmos in their package.
Vienna wants to nickel and dime you to spend more for more mics. We musicians do not want to play these games and find it almost insulting and childish.
Turn off three.
Vienna has way to many orchestra versions and quite frankly they all seem pretty similar.
Advice: Make a 1-3 great versions and the next generation of people will continue to pay to keep your doors open.
how to save tamplate in Vep? as in our DAW
Something Im not getting. You need to restart the VE each time you shut down and restart the machine, right? So you need to load it more then once every few days. Unless- you don’t shut down your computer (?).
I don’t shut my computer down, especially with the Apple silicon using so low wattage
I am using fl studio, what i have to do?
Write some awesome music
David, fantastic video! This will fuel some discussions among my peers 😇.
But what is the benefit of using VE Pro at all if it’s running on the same system?! Then why not just directly loading Kontakt/whatever directly in your DAW?!
It's much faster to load DAW projects if you don't have to load all the Kontakt instruments every time. When we work on a film, we have 60 DAW projects to load. Also, if the DAW crashes, it's fast to reload again. Also, with VEPro all the instruments can be played immediately. Plus the save time is much faster.
Thank you. I very much enjoyed Part 1 & 2.
I’m a professional musician who is about to build a home studio such as yours. It’s now been many many months of learning and deciding on both extensive hardware and software: DAWs, VST instruments and so on. Etc-etc . . .
Your information has been excellent❣️. Thank you again
Is a mac studio high spec, costing over £7000 twice as good as a PC set up with same specs, costing 50% less than the mac? Not a troll question, I'm just curious on the advantages.
It is. Hands down. I just made the switch. I will never own a PC again.
@@es__musicis it speed or reliability or both? I do get occasional crashes but that seems to be plugins. As for speed, my computer seems quick and easily comparable to the comparisons David did. Now I don't do a whole lot of audio processing, so is that where the mac out performs a PC?
@@markelvinstudio It’s all about the operating system for me. Windows drivers, errors that I could never fix in Cubase, that sorta thing. The SSD’s built into the macs are also faster than my SSD’s for my old PC. Again, because the os optimizes it on the mac in a different way. For me, the best way I can explain it is “it just works” and I don’t even have to think about anything. My $5,000 custom PC gave me a lot of frustration and made me OCD in a way I do not like. These Macs though are definitely a costly investment but I can see now why people have them for over a decade lol
@@es__music I think if I ever, somehow, was to earn good money from being a composer, investing in such a system would be wise, not only because of the points you made, but also the system cost could be offset for tax purposes!!
Totally! I never advocate debt or killing oneself with work hours to buy a computer. If what you have works, use it! But IMO macs are definitely worth it.@@markelvinstudio
ArchieGates!!!
kontakt would also load the samples faster if you re-saved ALL your kontakt libraries,not a small task
This makes my brain ache... in a good way.
Ha! I hear you and understand exactly. My brain has been aching for the past couple years about this stuff...I made the video I needed 2 years ago.