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  • Controlling volumes, pan etc in VE Pro... How do you do it?

    This may be a silly question... but I can't find a good solution anywhere...

    How do you control the individual volumes, pans, sends when you have a a VSL Multi Instrument in Logic?

    I know there are a few ways, but I haven't found one that is particularly easy to use.  I should say that while I am using a similar palette across cues, I'm not using it as much for a set orchestra (which could use more of a set it and forget it method of volume and panning) as for a palette, and therefore from cue to cue there are more variations in volumes, panning and effects. 

    If I use the built in Logic Multi Instrument in stereo, the channel strip to the left in the arrange window controls everything.  With Multi-Outputs it controls only outputs 1-2 of the Vienna, which is the wrong output 15 of 16 times.  The other problem with controlling the volumes and pans from within VE Pro is that when I switch sessions I need that data to switch as well.  The flashing arrow would seem to be the way to do this, but it reloads all of the samples, which totally defeats the purpose of the VE Pro for me.  The only solution I've found to that part of the problem is to write automation data for every parameter I ever use on every track so that when the session loads it will send that info to the VE Pro without having to reload... but that is a ton of extra steps...

    Another option I tried was creating a whole Environment setup where in the arrange you actually are on MIDI tracks which send MIDI to the VE Pro via an instrument track and also send volume, pan, and send info to an associated aux track.  This is much easier to use when composing than the previous option, but seems to be more taxing on the processor, because I think it puts all channels of the VE Pro essentially in record mode all the time.  Also it doesn't work for freezing or bouncing place which is necessitated be the additional hit on the processor.

    The final option I've found is to use 1 VE Pro per Instrument on a normal Instrument track.  This works great!  It's more taxing on the processor, but since Logic crashes when you have the Ensemble plug-in window open with more than 20 instances, that limits how big of a problem the additional hit to the processors can be.  So this works great for small ensembles/palettes, but not for the big stuff.

    So my question to the VSL community is which do you use?  Is there a better way that I haven't thought of, or does everyone just decide which of these options is the least frustrating?