I’ve been using Justin’s method of creating DDPs for some time which involves rendering the entire montage into a single file with all plugins baked in. This method carries over all the markers and meta data to a new single file montage. From there you convert the single file to 44.1 and swap it into the montage for making a DDP or exporting 16 bit files.
However, this method is not ideal when clients want a change to just one song, it means I have to re-render the entire album which can be very time consuming. So I have moved to rendering the tracks individually. However, with this method, I can’t see how I move from 48k to 16 44.1 keeping the meta date to create a DDP.
How are other people doing this? Thanks.
The reason I don’t have a better answer is because a shortcut like this is asking for problems later.
I always want a fluid “master” montage that has the entire album exactly as it should be and where I do the actual processing work. Even if you change one song in the master montage, it seems like a headache to then update that for any and all downstream montages without some kind of accidental error or discrepancy sneaking in.
Plus, one song might need to change today, a different song may need to change tomorrow, and when it’s fully approved you may need to make a vinyl master and/or hi-res master.
There is of course many ways to do the same thing but I can’t see how finding a shortcut for this scenario is a safe idea or overall time saver. The way I see it, it just creates more work and opens the door for errors. That’s a lot to keep track of, especially if you’re working on many projects in a given week.
Even if one song of the album needs to change, I render the full thing so that everything is cohesive in every format of the album master.
The other reason for rendering the full montage is to avoid plugin rendering errors, which are especially pronounced when albums have gapless/overlapping audio so this method solves multiple problems, and not using this method is just an invitation for issues.
Maybe somebody has a better idea but I’ve found this to be the simplest and safest way. If a render takes some time, there are always emails to send or other tasks that can be done instead of just staring at the progress meter.
Yes I take your point. It would be great if there could be a function where by you could take a 48k montage, press a button and it would output a 64 bit file and montage, render 24 bit files, convert to 44.1 and create a DDP and out 16 bit files all with one button. At least 80 percent of my clients want this for every project. Right now it’s a complex set of multi layered tasks, all of which I would have thought could be built in functions.
There could be some creative workaround that I haven’t thought of but the way I see it, even if there were some shortcuts and workarounds, it leaves a messy trail that would be hard to decode and reverse engineer in the future if needed and even a bit of a mess once the project is approved and ready for all the deliverables as you have kind of a hodgepodge of montages and master versions of various songs.
One master montage to create all the downstream versions seems like the simplest and safest way, and the “Whole Montage” render greatly helps mitigate plugin rendering issues. I see no reason to do it any other way.
More complicated and opening a door for user (or other) error doesn’t sound appealing.
But now I will shut up and see if there are any better ways of doing it that don’t have those potential compromises.
Yeh I meant after you have rendered the whole montage as a single file at the project sample rate. It would be good to have a one button solution to:
Render 24 bit files
Downsample to 44.1
Output 16 bit files
Create a DDP
Right now its a lot of work to do all of that, it’s complicated and I have to do it for every project, but it’s essentially all automatable once you’ve rendered the single file at 64 bit.