FabFilter

Hi,

today I had an issue where suddenly my work session would click and pop when playing low frequency content on one of my fx-tracks. First I had a glitch in a hidden automation lane in mind but there was nothing. The clicks where always in the same area but never in the exact same moment. So it could have been a drive issue. I copied everything to a new drive but the same thing happened.

When I moved the sound to a different location down the time-line the clicks where gone. Move it back to where I need it, clicks come back.

Then I tried to hit auto-suspend and voila! no clicking. So I thought I MUST be the automation. I checked all lanes on all busses that this sound went through till it reached the out but no spikes in any of the lanes. But still when I hit suspend no clicks.

Then about 2 minutes before I started to re-install the whole system I noticed that in the Mix-Window of PT the delay-compesation engine dynamically switches it’s shown values exactly when I hear these pops and clicks!!!

Till today I wasn't even aware of of this feature. I never thought the ADC would dynamically change it's values while you are playing. So learned something new there.

SO it turns out it’s actually a plugin in the session that changes it’s reported delay and then PT compensates the other tracks /busses. This leads to these clicks when playing low frequency content on a totally different track..

So I took the time to narrow down the offending plugin and landed on one of the FabFilter PRO-DS plugins on my dialogue-tracks. I noticed that there was an un-intentional automation that switched from wide-band to split-band and back which caused the ADC-engine to adjust all other tracks which then leads to the clicks. Note that the switch happens outside of any audio playing so on an empty section of that DX-track.

If it’s a feature it’s not a good one because even when there’s nothing playing through the plugin the ADC engine will still do the re-compensating. This is kind of a dangerous thing as it makes automation switching literally impossible as it might cause clicks on busses that have nothing to do with where the plugin actually is.

I think this is quite a dangerous thing. Can these plugins not report the maximum delay and then compensate internally when people adjust the lookahead or other parameters?

I've never seen a plugin that dynamically changes it's latency while you play depending on automate-able parameters.

Would be interested to hear FF's input on this.

Thanks!

Frank.

forgot to mention that's I'm on PT11.3.2 OSX10.10.3.

Hi Frank,

We change the latency dynamically because this lets you use Pro-DS in situations where the latency would otherwise be a problem, e.g. live vocal tracking.

We would advise to simply never automate parameters that affect the latency. In Pro-DS this applies to the processing mode (wide band / split band) parameter, and the lookahead enabled parameter.

Cheers,

Hi Frederik,

can you post a list of all parameters of the other FF plugins that change latency.

I've been bitten by this quite often and many fellow mixers I know. Since some plugs like the ProMB have gazillions of parameters it's quite tedious to eyeball and de-select them from the enabled list when you have auto-enable on in ProTools (which most people do).

Ultimately it would be best to drop such parameters entirely from AAX plugs as they will cause clicks in the session even when nothing is playing on the tracks with the offending plugins.

But we talked about this via direct email.

Hope this can be done as soon as possible as it's a very dangerous feature which is quite unique to FF plugins.

Thanks!

Frank.

Hi Frederik,

is there any news as to when you could offer a solution or work-around this issue that doesn't force me to eye-ball, hand-select and disable all latency changing parameters every single time I insert a FabFiler plugin?

Would be great of the offending parameters could simply be removed from automation by default.

I've been bitten by this again during a layout, and it took a long time to find the offending plug in a 200-track film mix session.

Thanks

Frank.

Hi Frank,

We'll look into it to see if we can make these parameters non-automatable without breaking backwards compatibility. The problem is that in most hosts this makes the parameters completely invisible which could be quite odd.

How does it happen that a latency parameter gets automated? Are you trying to automate preset changes? I assume you're not changing the parameter manually.

Cheers,

Hi Frederik,

I trioed to explain this before. Most people have "enable automation parameters" prefs on because it normally makes no sense to automate one particular parameters. Especially not in a film mix when you don't know what you are going to need down the line over a months long mix.

You said I should manually disable any parameters that cause latency changes. That's fine, but:

1) I need a list of all the latency changing parameters of all the FF plugs please

2) I would have to do this for EVERY SINGLE instance of every FF plugin in my mix session across hundreds of tracks. Which means open the auto-enable window scroll down the list of lanes and manually select and remove the offending parameters.

This is something that is completely impossible in a large mix session for a movie. It would take a day to do this and I'd have to do it again for the next film with a different track-layout.

The reason why automation glitches come into sessions is because of auto-conforms over the course of a post-production. Every new cut can have hundreds of changes and those conforms often result in unwanted automation-"spikes" that normally don't cause any problems when they are on empty tracks. Not so with most FF plugins as these changes cause clicks even when nothing is playing on these tracks. So it's **extremely** time-consuming to find these glitches and eliminate them.

At the moment I see no other way than to entirely disable the parameters from the AAX versions of your plugins. Since PT is the only AAX host I see no problem that would cause in other flavors of the plugins.

But I'm not a programmer. So maybe I'm wrong.

Thanks!

Frank

Hi, just to confirm that I had exactly the same issue with clicks caused by Pro-DS automation jump. Trashed the PT Prefs first and after long investigation after that I noticed the ADC jump on one of the ADR tracks - never seen that before! Then found this thread (Thank you, Frank!) and fixed it but spent several hours and the clients are not that happy!
Anyway, still it's good there is a solution!
Best,
Ivo

Hi Frank,

Thanks for the clear explanation. We're going to look into it to see if we can disable automation for these parameters. For now I'll give you a list, even though I fully understand that it's a pain to manually disable them...

Pro-C 2:
Oversampling
Lookahead Enabled

Pro-DS:
Band Processing
Lookahead Enabled
Oversampling

Pro-G:
Lookahead Enabled
Oversampling

Pro-L:
Oversampling

Pro-MB:
Processing Mode
Oversampling
Lookahead Enabled

Pro-Q 2:
Processing Mode
Processing Resolution

Saturn:
High Quality

Cheers,

Thank you, Federik!

Just bumping this up so it's not forgotten.

Can't wait for a fix for this issue.

Thanks!

Frank.

Hi Frank,

We haven't forgotten! We won't be able to fix it very soon though but we have this noted for the next general update of all plug-ins...

Cheers,

The new version(s) that came out don't seem to have changed in this regard. Or was something done to avoid this problem (at leat in ProTools?).

Thanks!

Frank.

Hi Frank,

After carefully considering the implications, we didn't want to change the existing parameters in plug-ins in this way because we want to guarantee that existing sessions are not broken by bug-fix updates.

Cheers,

Hi Frank and Frederik,

I am a Mix Tech at Sony in Culver City and have recently come across the same issue with the Pro DS plugin that Frank has been experiencing. It's caused us much trouble on a very large project here. Part of the issue is that because it changes the delay compensation for the entire session, the ticks and snaps created seem to be coming from other units such as music than from the dialog tracks that are causing the issue. In loud scenes the error also may not be noticed immediately. It makes it hard to troubleshoot. You are correct that this is a parameter that does not need to be automating, however, amidst the multitude of conforms and edits that go with a project of this size and the hectic mix schedules with no time to hunt down issues the bad automation is popping up. It definitely causes me to recommend my mixers do not buy/use this set of plugins as it can't be trusted.

Still finding this with ProDS 1.10 - Feb 15, 2018.

Finding it's like Pro Tools is slightly pausing the audio bus to adjust the delay comp, causing snaps on unrelated audio - i.e.: FX pops, when only the dialog channels have ProDS on them.. Not being printed into the FX stem, but hearing them on monitoring.

For us, it's a direct result of conforming reels where there is no automation data in place to now snapping to split/wide. Even tho, there is no dialog playing at this position, the ADC change is enough to throw the whole session.

Could the plugin not call ALL the delay comp it may need all the time?

Hi Matt,

We have been reluctant to change the behavior of parameters in existing plug-ins in minor bug-fix updates because we want you to be able to install these minor updates without worrying whether this will break existing sessions.

However, since this issue keeps coming up we will look into it more deeply to see if there is a way to make latency-changing parameters non-automatable without breaking backwards compatibility.

Note that with Pro-L 2 (where we didn't we have to worry about backwards compatibility), we already took the step of making latency-changing parameters non-automatable.

And yes, Pro-DS could of course always declare the same latency but that has the disadvantage that you can't use it in zero latency mode which is very useful as well (e.g. in live situations).

Cheers,

Thank you very much Fabfilter for doing this:

"Made the Processing Mode and Processing Resolution parameters non-automatable, to prevent automation from changing the latency during playback. In addition, all interface-only parameters such as the analyzer settings are now also non-automatable."

Does this only apply to the Q3 or do the others still switch the ADC around?

Many thanks!

F

Hi everyone I just got the ff stuffs and got the same issue, I read all the answers but I didn’t understand how to fix this issue yet.
Can someone explain me please?!

Hi Antonio,

The above issue has been fix in a previous update. If you are still having issues, please send us an email at info@fabfilter.com with a clear description of your problem.

Cheers,