Christian Thomas asks, "What do we do when things go wrong?"

Three years ago, we made The Big Decision to upgrade to a Pro Tools HD3 system. We'd been working very well using both LE and M Powered flavours of Pro Tools, along with occasional use of an old mix farm system (thanks to Bang Post), but our work flow and business plans for the future suggested that we took the plunge and invested in a rock solid system. The plan was to attract large name clients and producers to studio 1 and to be able to work to picture in studio 2.

And of course, the "powered by HD3" tag brought inquiries from the labels, and we got to work with some very big names because of it. Great!

But then bugs crept into the system - one particularly nasty bug resulted in the HD cards being sent back to AVID, and then back to our supplier, and effectively denying us the HD system for eighteen months. The core card had been repaired, but we were still only able to run the system as an HD2. Nevertheless, HD2 is HD2 and is still superb and rock solid.

We'd been working with a huge producer for a week, and the system was a thing of technological beauty, doing everything we asked of it. The week of shooting vocals went perfectly. We had just dropped the legend off when we returned to the studio and started the system up. The bug had returned - total freeze on the Mac when I put the system into playback. Thank goodness it didn't occur halfway through the vocal session!

So, it was time to return to PTLE. Fortunately, most of the plug ins on the Mac worked in RTAS format, so I still had access to the Waves Platinum bundle. I created a session template, and the first thing that I noticed was instead of having 256 busses, I was limited to 36. Ok, that's not a huge problem - I can work around not having a dedicated synth delay buss ;-)

Then there was the latency - not a huge problem again, as the Mac is a Quad core beast and can handle running low buffer sizes without compromising too much, but still something you have to juggle and think around. Without wanting to flog poor AVID, running PT7.4 meant that I also had to work out delay compensation. Now this isn't a problem either, you just have to be aware of the effect of running high sample plugins, and putting delays in to compensate this. Again, nothing too dramatic, you just have to be aware of it - yes, I could have processed the audio with the effect in audiosuite and shifted it manually, and maybe that's the way I'd do it if I was running a large multitrack session. Which is of course the next biggie - large multitrack sessions on PTLE7.4 - as we know without the production tool kits, you can't run more than 32 tracks. Why this is still a paid upgrade for pre PT9 is beyond me - and as you'll understand, there was no way we were willing to give AVID any more money for a product that we'd effectively paid for in the first place!

Then of course we had to send the HD cards and the Mac, and the ilok back to our supplier - no more Mac, no more Waves. So we bought a Mac Mini and ran PT8. There's lots of issues with this as well, but that's for another story!

So what do you do when things go south, apart from turn work away? Well, in some respects, going back to LE meant that we had to simplify the workflow and we made a lot of mix decisions on the fly. So in some respects it made us commit earlier and get the sounds we wanted right from the start. We've also had to pick and choose the kind of work we do, and this has meant turning down a lot of borderline / close margin work. So perhaps we've ended up working smarter rather than harder. We've also been able to consolidate some of our revenue streams and dedicate more time and effort to them.

Don't get me wrong - I can't wait to get the HD3 back in all of its full glory - I do miss that synth delay buss after all. But I have certainly changed the way I record and mix, and it has been a wrench not having the Waves plug ins available, but you get round it, work with what you have got to make the best of it, and I feel that my craft has improved because of it.

Note: HD3 is back in all its glory at Space Studios. More on this later.