Audition - Poor Latency and Distortion after applying effects to track

[tomg51755914]

Hi there,

I'm an intermediate user of Adobe Audition and using DAWs for sound design/sound mixing in general, so I am still very much learning the more advanced aspects of this program.

I had two effects (Studio Reverb and Chorus) on several stretched clips and it sounded exactly how I wanted.

Then I was told by my Sound Editing Professor that its much more efficient to apply effects to the track, rather than individual clips, then to just add a bypass to the effects once you're done with them.

I did this, and now my clips are heavily delayed (the volume meters react a second or two before I hear the sound) and the resulting sound I hear is far more distorted than my original.

Even when I remove the effects from the track and go back to the individual clip effects, they still seem to be affected by this poor performance.

Is my session the problem? Is my hardware too old?

Any assistance would be appreciated, as I want to know as much about DAWs as possible.

Feel free to ask about any of my specs or session data to help determine what my issue may be.

Thank you

[Bob_Howes · Accepted solution]

Some effects (reverbs and chorus among them) can use quite a lot of processor time and cause latency. 

A way around this for you is probably to pre-render each track while you're working on them--this is done using the tiny "lightning bolt" graphic right at the bottom of the effects rack area.  This doesn't commit you to using the effects as set--you can still go back and change them then pre-render again.

As for levels, things like reverb and chorus add extra content to your track and will therefore increase levels.  You'll find controls at the bottom of the effects rack that allow you to adjust input and output levels to compensate for this.

[tomg51755914]

Thank you so much, Bob.

Pre-Rendering did the trick.

Cheers and have a good one,

Tom

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

tomg51755914  wrote

Then I was told by my Sound Editing Professor that its much more efficient to apply effects to the track, rather than individual clips, then to just add a bypass to the effects once you're done with them.

An interesting idea, but I'm reasonably confident that if there is any advantage at all, it will be marginal, and it may even be completely incorrect. The reasoning behind this is simple; if you have a single clip with an effect applied to it, that effect will be active during the processing of the clip, and not when it isn't needed. If you apply the effect to a track, and bypass it when you aren't using it, it's still present and active, just operating with a bypass setting - but it's there all the time, and consuming processing power. But as a caveat, I should add that I have no absolute proof that this is true. And neither does your prof...

But as noted, pre-rendering is the real answer to this, as then it doesn't matter how you apply effects to your track, as it will be the entire track that's rendered anyway.

[ryclark]

A common method of reducing the amount of processing for reverb effects is to use Track sends to send audio from all the tracks requiring reverb to a common Bus that just has the single reverb effect applied. Thus you are only having to use processing power for one process heavy effect rather than trying to use many applications of the effect. The Bus master fader then adjusts the reverb level sent into the mix and the Track Sends level controls the amount of each track sent to the Reverb effect. This is applying 'parallel' effects rather than 'serial' ones.

Serial vs. Parallel Processing - FRONT of HOUSE