Hi Rob, Ben -
Thanks for the comments. My staccato strings are a combination/layers of VSL appasionata, and these staccato strings I found on ProjectSAM Symphobia. In general, I find the Symphobia-type "prebuilt" stuff utterly useless, and in this case, virtually all of the samples on there have very limited usefulness, but there was a single patch in there that had a quality I liked. It seems to round things out a bit.
My orchestra is a really eclectic mix of libraries and patches, nearly all custom. Like, every patch I use has Modwheel control over volume/dynamics, and usually within that it's a custrom velocity curve to match my playing style. But also, I've gone in in some cases and retuned samples, that sort of thing. But it's ProjectSAM Brass, plus some SonicImplants Brass, plus some VSL Brass, and pretty much the same story throughout each section, with a bunch of London Orchestral Percussion in there, too, and the True Strike stuff, of course. I've honestly built and rebuilt and tweaked it so much, I couldn't off the top of my head tell you what exactly I use without looking, but I have 5 Gigastudio PC's absolutely running to the hilt, plus 3 instances of Kontakt and Vienna Ensemble running on my host Mac. I do all my composition and recording inside of Pro Tools 8, so I can feed all the gigastudio stuff in digtially, optically, at 48kHz. There is no analog in my chain. So it's nice for instant bouncing and mixing on the fly as well. Oh, also I have 6 instances of Altiverb running, a couple of Focusrite EQ plug-ins, and a Masterx3 plug-in on the whole mix. Also, each instrument has EQ on it back at the Gigastudio level.
There's just a ton of bullshit to go through to make these things sound passable.
By the way, the cue has changed starting about mid-way through. The film I'm doing is in Japanese, and I didn't understand fully what they were saying. Upon discussing the drama with the director, I had to make some adjustments, and prolong the cue throughout the scene.
Captial City v2
_Mike