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  • VEP Mixer sound?

    M
    M
    Just picked up Vienna Ensemble Pro yesterday and installed everything. Seems to work as advertised. We loaded up a large orchestral cue made up of East West stuff along with Omnisphere, Stylus, Trillian, Kontakt/Symphobia and Ivory. We then transferred all the sounds to VEP and brought them up in our ProTools HD2 set up. It all worked fine, but we noticed a slight difference in sound. When using the VEP set up, the sound of the mix was a bit less dynamic and didn't seem to have quite the depth as when we used all the plug-ins/samples directly in ProTools. It was very noticeable on percussion sounds as the attacks seemed slightly softer? Anyone else have this issue? Does the VEP mixer use any type of limiting on the Master Bus? Thanks.
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD

    Welcome Michael C,

    are you sure that the pan-laws were set to the same in both cases? Most people tend to get fooled by the fact that different pan-laws lead to different results.

    Kind regards,

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • M
    M
    Thanks for the reply. I will check the pan law; is that in the preferences in VEP? I will look it up. We felt that there might be some kind of built in limiting on the VEP mixer. Do you know if this is the case? Thanks!
  • D
    D

     There is no built in limiter.

    DG
  • W
    W

    This is a very interesting post, because I had come to the same conclusion. For some reason I have found that the sound from the direct plug-in does indeed seem to have more depth and punch. Perhaps it is my imagination - but perhaps not.......... and worth checking?

    kind regards, woy
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD

    Please remember that PT doesn't allow for a 32-bit floating point digital signal transfer. If you go above 0 dBfs on VE's main output, all the peaks will simply get chopped of when they reach PT. (Martin Saleteg will hopefully correct me if I got that wrong).

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • M
    M
    We aren't going to 0 dBfs on the VE's main output Dietz. I thought the ProTools mixer is a 48 bit floating point mixer and I am running the dithered ProTools mixer. How is that affecting my sound by running VE into my ProTools session? Thank you!
  • M
    M

    VE delivers 32-bit floating point data into ProTools. The data delivered from a single instrument plugin, hosted in ProTools, will be exactly the same as data delivered from a single instrument hosted in VE, when the channel and master sliders are set to 0dB. When using TDM, this data will be converted to 24-bit fixed point for channel processing, which then is mixed on a scaled 48-bit fixed point bus.
  • M
    M
    Thanks for the reply Martin. We tried a test this morning with several different tracks. There were no reverbs or modulation effects on the individual VI tracks. We brought them into ProTools TDM via VE Pro and bounced that to a file. We then just ran the VI plug-in directly in ProTools and bounced that to a file. Imported both tracks and they never nulled. We tried to slide one of the tracks by a few samples (in case this was a delay compensation issue) and still the tracks never nulled. Again, we tried all kinds of different source material. We all felt in a blind test that the plug-in directly in ProTools was a bit less muddy and the image was just a bit sharper with more depth than when we imported it with VE Pro. We love the idea of VE Pro and it seems to really work as advertised and more than likely will use it because of the ProTools issue with VI plug-ins, but we are concerned about the sonic differences especially in a large session. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thank you!
  • D
    D

    There are far too many variables going on here to narrow it down, I think. Things that you have to be sure of  are:

    1. Buffer on VE Pro set to "none", to eliminate possible dynamic ADC issues
    2. Different playback between the RTAS and AU/VST versions of the plug
    3. 32bit float vs 48fixed
    4. Pan law

    Very difficult to narrow down.

    DG
  • M
    M

    DG's post gives the most likely explanations. I can assure you that nothing "special" is done in VEPro. If you set the VEPro channel to 0dB, and pipe it through a NET bus into RTAS/ProTools - there is no processing (beyond the multiplication with 0dB ie 1.0) on the way to the RTAS plugin in PT. There is no mud generator present.
  • M
    M
    last edited
    last edited

    @MS said:

    DG's post gives the most likely explanations. I can assure you that nothing "special" is done in VEPro. If you set the VEPro channel to 0dB, and pipe it through a NET bus into RTAS/ProTools - there is no processing (beyond the multiplication with 0dB ie 1.0) on the way to the RTAS plugin in PT. There is no mud generator present.

    Thanks for all the replies. If during your next testing of all things VEP you have a chance to check this out on your own, I would appreciate your findings. We plan on using VEP for all of our larger orchestral cues and find it a huge help. Please also consider the feature request we made regarding how you name midi tracks within the RTAS plug in ProTools. It would help our workflow immensely if you could let the Instrument tracks in VEP show up in the RTAS midi selection similarly to how Reason works with Rewire in RTAS/ProTools.