I know this is opening up a can of worms of fanboy-ism, Cubase bashers and everyone in between, but I really would like to know how someone like Junkie XL deals with the interminably long save times in very large projects? I’ve seen his setup and my scoring template is not close to as large as his. The save times for me on a big scoring project here are work-destroyingly painful at times. It’s like running a race (I work super fast) and then having a giant steel store slam in front of you for up to 15 seconds at times. His template is truly immense, so I’m curious as to how he deals with this Cubase issue. I know moderators have mentioned that it’s a major job to have Cubase be as fast to save as Pro Tools, for instance, because of the legacy code in Cubase I would guess. When I was composing in Pro Tools, even the biggest sessions had pretty damn fast save times, and the same in Reaper. I know many here complain about it…I don’t even know why I’m posting. Just frustrated at the moment I guess.
Calm down, some of you – I want to stay on Cubase, but man oh man would I love for this to be changed as soon as possible. I know it most likely won’t be at least until Cubase 10. Yikes.
Perhaps try using Vienna Instruments VEPRO to host your template which will give you way faster Cubase save times and means that moving between projects for different cues or episodes requires no sample loading at all? I’d imagine Junkie XL is doing that with his various sections running on slave computers but it still helps even running everything on one computer. In the future it would be great to see this whole side of Cubase improved of course as you say.
Large templates benefit from a few things…(some of which Steinberg took appalingly long time to sort out e.g correct recall of Expression maps with disabled tracks)
Disable all tracks in you template once it is set up. (I use a touch screen similar to mapped buttons like Tom’s to do this as well as many other functions). (use purge function in any instance of Kontakt before saving template*, see below)
Recall them only when you want to use them. You can use hide and unhide to great effect also.
*Ensemble pro is very useful especially for e.g Racks of Kontakt. You can use ‘purge’ all samples as well in kontakt to save load times in the Template. IF you can max out the ram on your main computer this will serve you well, only go the VSL path on slave PCs once you absolutely need to.
Play engine you can use note learn to strip out unused samples (not as good as Kontakts purge though)
Vsts are not really a bother, but again disable them all in your saved template.
Good luck, be patient, it takes a great deal of planning, thought and time to create big workable templates!
I realized that, on my side, long saving times are due to some VSTi being loaded in the project (I can’t recall which ones at the moment though). I guess having all the VSTi loaded in VEPro removes a charge in the Cubase project, so having only MIDI data to save is much quicker.
But in actuality when you enable all or most of those tracks you’ve disabled/purged in your template as you’re composing and then mixing then you’re stuck with running into a brick wall in the middle of a fast run, every single time you save. I guess the only way around it is using VE Pro…one doesn’t really need to in some of those other DAWs with big scoring sessions as far as keeping shorter save times, but I guess that’s life for now.
