Reply To: Latency in overdubs?

February 15, 2023 at 6:47 am #4916
bob stjohn
Participant

    “The higher the sample rate, the shorter the delay.”  well, didn’t THIS blow my mind.  never thought of that.  as the majority of my work is mixing, i deal with latency on a daily basis.  and there is this “dirty little secret” to protools, mixing and latency…in regarding to automation.  it just isn’t as precise as we may believe. when you are mixing ITB, and you have a few plugs on the master fader, you start looking at delay compensation in excess of 8000 samples.  it becomes obvious when looking at the meters, and even MORE obvious when you are doing fader automation that requires precision (perhaps a cut on the beat, or automation for a specific word or guitar part, for example).  i had some delusion, that over the years, avid had addressed this issue…but obviously it’s still somewhat of an issue; my workaround is to just shut off delay compensation while doing precision moves (and suck it up and listen to all of the drum sampling plugs playing back delayed and out of sync) and turn it back on when i’m done.  One thing is for sure…as long as you have a master fader on your mix output, you’ll have latency when doing actual recording; so when tracking, i’ll typically use stems and as low as a buffer as possible, as well as NO master faders or routing live tracks through aux returns…