Build huge templates?

That’s a great system. I have not been fortunate(?) enough to have a project with 100s of tracks (the largest so far was about 96 tracks), but I can see the logic in this.

So it might make sense to have this type of “uber” setup ready for a larger project as you say. I like it.

I have been considering a similar approach as my my current system is a bit under powered for the current version of Cubase. CS.

Not sure if it’s what you’re referring to, but I have huge templates loaded in VEPro on a slave machine. It also contains groups of certain VI’s (Evolve Mutations, Omnisphere, etc) that are all ready to go on their own tracks…I just need to select the patches. Also, a full orchestra is in the templates along with my “staples”. The best part is, I can switch between projects without ever having to load anything…it even saves tweaks that I make for each VI/project. For example, the current film I’m scoring, has about 100 cues. I save each cue as its own project because I don’t ever need to load anything between each one; super fast workflow.

Curious, How are you saving each cue without creating 100 instances of vepro? Also are you recording audio for each cue as you score it?

Being organised is great. However…

Templates tend to lead one down a particular path.

Good if you do the same things over and over… and are on deadline.

But… templates tend to lead one down a particular path.

One other thing… there are practical considerations with making mega-elaborate templates

  1. The bigger the CPR the more likely that weird things happen.

  2. It’s no thrill having a CPR with ‘hundreds of tracks’… certainly no badge of virility. Hard to navigate. Large track counts are often the result of
    a) the limitations of sample libs… where you need 12 tracks to emulate all the articulations of one set of violins. can’t be helped.

b) people going nuts. :smiley:

The template I choose gets loaded once…when I open the first project template. I have many Cubase templates ready to go ie: Horror, Action, Romantic, Classical, etc. Once I sequence the cue(s), I save it as a project. For instance, it might be called “cue 23 car chase”. Once I’m finished with that cue, I can either delete the tracks and rename it as the next cue, or close it completely and reopen the template. I typically just move onto the next section in the film and “save as” the next cue. The cool part is, all of the instruments remain loaded in VEPro (called the “preserve” function), and it only takes a few seconds to load each project. A film I’m working on right now has eight instances of VEPro loaded, with sixteen channels loaded in each (32 output channels). Each channel can contain up to sixteen instruments, but I usually only load about eight in each (this is the beauty of the VEPro VST3 version!). All of the sections in Cubase are divided into group folders, so I simply collapse the ones I’m not using which cleans up my screen real estate in the project window. And by having everything loaded on the slave PC, all of my Mac resources are dedicated to the DAW and not virtual instruments.

As far as recording (or rendering) the audio, this can be done at any time. Once the cues are 100% complete, I just export them. They can be exported as stems or as single audio files…whatever is required. Cubase is so damn easy for film scoring, best move I ever made! I came from using Cakewalk for twenty years.

True, but it’s a very time consuming task to audition and load up your instruments every time you want to get creative. Especially with film, where you could spend hours sifting through your sounds. With templates, it’s all right there ready to go. And in C7.5, you can hide all of the tracks you don’t want to see.

Ahh, same path not in my case, the template is the frame, it’s the vst’s that I save by project and or genere and swap those as needed for each project…

ahh I see, I really like this workflow idea , process of yours, modular / cue approach… I have a VEpro license its two years old , I abandoned it so I will take a look at this in between projects. Are you getting zero, or low latency from slave to master? Given the large amount of tracks you can dump into the master project without the limitations of an ADAT audio card, how do you deal with Cubase limitations on internal outputs on the master sequencer ?

My slave right now is dedicated to brass and strings only, and its all on key-switches and routed into my template so I turn on the slave and dont need to tinker, nor have it take up monitor space, this leaves three monitors for my project views, the 4th monitor plays the video.

I actually work in MIDI for the entire score,( including rendering one stereo stem from midi for purposes of review ) until all revisions are made and approved, then I render all tracks, do a rough mix, and deliver to post house. Obviously the advantages are huge in flexibility to make changes, copy and paste parts across cues, add an octave to a string part or change the melody in the middle of a sequence on the fly all without audio tracks to deal with, or re-do, etc.

This reminds me of something I heard in an interview with Brian Eno. He said when he got a new synth, the first thing he did was delete all the presets so they wouldn’t influence how he approached the synth.

In general, templates are for orchestral instruments which sound like, well, orchestral instruments. No need to reinvent the wheel - or viola - every time you need one (unless you’re into sound design stuff).

Synths - I don’t think anyone has synth patches in their template (do they?) I have blank instances so they’re all routed, that’s it.

yes, sort of, I have blank vst instances that are routed except some contain staple sounds such as sub base, a few pads, etc, around 30 vsts routed and ready to go, Then I fill l in the vsts slots as needed for the genre, the score. Orchestra is stagnant once set up so it does reside on the slave and awaits key switch commands.

Yes, but those blank instances are still part of a template…it’s a huge time saver.

Brian Eno: Can’t stand his music, but -many- of his ideas about ‘creativity’ are worth thinking about. And here’s one (for me anyhoo.) EVERY decent musical idea I have ever had has been as the result of a mistake that I then tweaked. Unless you FORCE yourself to change things up you’ll keep doing the same junk over and over. Which may be what you want. But creativity is mutation… which is by accident.

And so my emphasis is to make it as easy as possible to AVOID using templates. Do what you need to do to be able to do something really different every time out.

YMMV

—JC


I totally agree, but the term “template” is a vague term. For example, my templates include dozens of VI’s loaded into VEPro/Cubase (in addition to the pre-loaded “staple” patches) . The benefit is that all of those VI’s are already routed and assigned to their own tracks inside Cubase, all I need to do is select the patches. So I’ll have, for example, 16 blank instances of Omnisphere ready to go. If you’ve never used VEpro, it’s a huge time saver having them already loaded and routed.

Yes, absolutely.

There are of course templates and templates. I have one for orchestral stuff (which is what most people think of as templates in media circles anyway), but I have another that’s just blank instances of synths, plugins, etc, all routed correctly, sidechains set up (but turned off by default) all ready to go. I don’t see either of these as the enemy of creativity, quite the opposite - it frees you up from pure engineering chores which disrupt the creative flow.

So I think the Brian Eno discussion is a red herring really. These sorts of templates are something else entirely - it’s the equivalent to having kit plugged into the mixer and routed in the analogue domain rather than piled into a heap in the corner, nothing to do with synth presets etc. And if you have an orchestral template, then you have the LSO miced in the next room and brought into the 200 channel mixer too. What a wonderful world in which we live :slight_smile:

Hi All.

Back working on this issue. I eventually set up my 8DIO ADAGIO Strings Collection as trackpresets to try the modular idea I described in the initial post. It works OK. But I recently saw this video:

And became somewhat envious of the ease with which the composer is able to instantly choose articulations from his collection. Seems like a HUGE benefit to “the flow”. But it means having a huge template. I recently doubled my ram to 28GB, so I am hoping that having a larger template is possible and I’m back to trying to figure this out.

I came across a few resources that others may find helpful.

A PDF tutorial (quite extensive) by Tobias Escher on setting up an orchestral template with VEPro: Orchestral Templates - Tutorial

An interesting tidbit on the ThinkSpace forum about a potential limitation in Cubase that adds time to loading large templates: https://www.thinkspaceonline.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1741

A cool idea on organizing a large template in cubase over on the Soundsonline forum: EastWest Sounds

Anyway, back on it. If anyone has suggestions, they are welcome. Thanks.

Im trying to make that work as well in cubase… I have for example all articulations setup… But the returns for them all is making cubase choke… even with using VEPro. Though i only have the 1 master and one slave at the moment.
My resource meter is pegged pretty much at idle with no midi data… I wish there was a way i could eliminate the individual articulation outputs but still get that data out without using batch export which if i only had groups coming back to cubase i could only output at the group level… not the articulation level. if we had a way to select the midi tracks and have it export based on selection rather then based on ticking the boxes in the export batch dialog it might work… but as it stands id have to solo each track and use its group or stereo out to do the same thing if i kill all the articulation returns from VEPro

Hi,
I would consider working with VEPro, even on the same machine. It is really a great helper with huge templates.
The biggest orchestral template to date I’ve created for more or less testing purposes had over 3000 midi tracks plus sends, subgroups and groups. All hosted in VEPro and saved as a one big template with all the samples purged from Kontakt so the initial load time is much quicker and only the midi notes really played/used in a cue are loaded into RAM.
If I work on a smaller cue for TV and I don’t need all the available Percussion or every possible string articulation I can delete those tracks from the Cubase session and from the VEPro for even faster initial load. This is also a good way to create smaller templates originating from the big one.
Every group of midi tracks grouped by articulation for example (only short string articulations) or by libraries (only VSL stuff etc) can be saved in Cubase as Track Preset, same goes for VEPro (metaframes) and Kontakt (multis) and be used as a building blocks for creating new templates from scratch every time I don’t want/need to start with the very huge template.

You can also reffer to this thread for some more informations on this topic:

Cheers!

I am working with VEPro… and multiple machines. with 9 play plugins Full (9slots each (multitimbral) thats 162 audio returns per frame… and i have 10 frames worth.
it chokes

I am now making one with just the main instrument returns… i.e violas cellos french-horns etc. Instead of each and every articulation having its own audio return… Are you able to have each articulation audio return avail. without it using too many resources?