FabFilter

Hi,

This is a lengthy post. I've been experiencing my Pro Tools session load times increasing substantially. After some thorough testing of ALL of my plugins, I've finally narrowed it down to Pro Q3, my most-used and favorite plugin.

Sometimes will use more than 1 instance of ProQ3 on one track. For example, my snare I'll do EQ (ProQ3)->transient design->compressor->saturation-> then another EQ (ProQ3) at the end of the chain.

This type of chain with 2 Pro Q3s is happening on only 12 of the 73 tracks and it is increasing my current project load time in excess of 4 minutes. I have screenshots and care share a session. I've been using this technique for a while but it has not been a problem in the past. What I found today- if I disable my 2nd instances of ProQ3, the session load time drops from 4:30 to 1:18. All of my ProQ3 instances are set to low latency with no crazy settings, so this seems like a disproportionate use of DSP. Tried installing the newest version of ProQ3 but that did not help. The project I'm referencing includes 6 songs with the same layout- roughly 73 tracks each, but only 12 of them have more than 1 instance of Pro EQ and I'm seeing this on 6 different songs in this project. So turning off these 12 EQs is resulting in almost a 3 minute reduction in load time.

I'm sure people may chime in and say "use less EQ's" but I learned this technique from watching very talented mixers on "Nail the Mix" and it is working well for me to be able to do some processing, then one last stage of cleanup at the end of the chain. Can anyone test their on your side by putting an extra ProQ3 at the end of your chain on your tracks and do a "save as" as a separate session and let me know if it increases your load time substantially?

My computer is very fast- i9 9900K, 128 GB of RAM, ultra fast M2 drives.