I had a home project filled with automation (“75 tracks”, some with up to 4 or 5 automation lanes), and last night I needed to insert 16 bars of silence in a section of the project where there happened to be a lot of automation changes.
After inserting silence, the second part of the project (the one to the right of the inserted bars) sounded horrible.
It seemed that in the left-most 16 bars of the tracks pushed to the right by the inserted silence, almost all but not all of the automation appropriately traveled with their displaced events; unfortunately some of that automation remained in the same place, and was not moved to the right by the inserted silence. That’s why the results sounded horrible.
This was reliably reproducible, automation on the same tracks being the culprit each time. There were no locked tracks, visible or in folders. And indeed, “Automation follows events” is preferenced to “on”.
After hours of failing to individually manually drag the automation on each of those stubborn tracks to the right just exactly the correct amount, I gave up and Rendered-in-Place each of those tracks instead.
As i was going through all this I was reminded of the words of an acquaintance who has made his living using Cubase for decades, who firmly believes automation is “unreliably fiddly”, and he has somehow accordingly adjusted his workflow to avoid it as much as possible.
I’m beginning to wonder, is he right? Alternatively (and not mutually exclusive) if the buggy behavior is actually between my ears rather than in Cubase/my system … well that would be a drag, but I can live with it, I’ll keep on trying anyway. Just wish that didn’t have such a negative impact on sleep hygeine!
Can anyone tell me please what I might have done differently to deal with, or ideally avoid dealing with, that stubborn, immobile automation?
Thank you!
C12.0.30 Pro, W10
(I can make a vid if my description isn’t clear enough).