Simultaneous tracks & Session Backup

risenwithhim wrote on 9/6/2003, 8:54 AM
Roughly, what is the limitation on # of monaural audio tracks that can be recorded simultaneously in Vegas 4 using the following combination:

48kHz/16bit audio, 1.2 gHz Athlon w/512 MB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD?


How do you guys back up sessions? Do you find that DVD-R has the needed capacity, or just buy a new HDD for each session?

Comments

drbam wrote on 9/6/2003, 10:00 AM
Given that every system is different, you will just need to experiment to see how many tracks you can record. My guess would be that you *might* be able to squeeze in 16 trks but perhaps not. There's a lot of other factors to consider. Obviously you will need more than one soundcard to record more than 10.

At 16 bit, DVD backup would be fine. I prefer to use a separate hard drive for backup which later becomes an archive. All my drives are on removeable bays which makes things really easy.

drbam
risenwithhim wrote on 9/6/2003, 11:06 AM
I appreciate the quick reply. I should add that I'd be using the MOTU 2408 with 3 banks of 8-channel TDIF I/O.
16 simultaneous record tracks would be splendid. I'm assuming playback is less taxing than record? For instance, should I expect be able to playback 24 mono tracks back through the 2408 in realtime, given very little use of RT effects in Vegas?
pwppch wrote on 9/6/2003, 12:33 PM
Playback would typically be more taxing than recording. Recording is simply a dump to the disk with little touching of the incomming audio stream.

Playback on the otherhand - depending on the complexity of the project - is doing a considerable amount of work - reading the file, converting to floating point, mixing, normalizing, metering, cursor, scrolling, etc, etc. Even with no FX on the tracks or buses, there is more going on than during record. Also, when recording, the playback engine is active, if there is anything going on with regard to playback, recording becomes almost nominal in comparision to playback.

Of course, there are dependencies on hardware and drivers and the whole "kmixer" when using WDM based Wave Emulation, but these things occur with playback as well.

Peter