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On a recent project (see my last post) I ran into a situation where Logic Pro was literally stumbling and halting quite frequently giving me the standard (and far from helpful) “Logic is too slow error”.

However, I noticed that if I stopped and started it from the same spot many, many times it eventually played through just fine. How weird!

After much testing, I figured out what I believe the cause of this. This recent project had the following attributes to it:

1. I was running on my Power Mac G5/2×1.8 Ghz with 2 GB RAM
2. Most recent version of Logic Pro and Mac OS X 10.4.x
3. The project had some very long “songs” which were film scores, ranging anywhere from 5-15+ minutes per “song”. (I have multiple “songs” that then made up the entire project
4. The cues were all written in a classic “star trek” style, utilizing full orchestral sounds, though with sparse orchestration. Hence, I might have 40-60 exs24 instruments loaded up (many of them keyswitched samples from the likes of libraries like Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl) and Project SAM True Strike, etc.) so there was a significant amount of samples at my disposal.
5. exs24 streams samples from disk, but also requires a certain amount of RAM per exs24 instrument (around 8-14 MB, depending on settings and such)
6. I was using very limited “plug-ins” besides a reverb or two which was being powered off of a UAD-1 card (almost zero CPU hit) and was streaming the samples from a separted SATA RAID HDD, so bandwidth on that end should not be a problem

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A few weeks ago I got a very interesting offer. The fan-film project “Starship Farragut” was in desperate need of a composer for their pilot episode called “The Capitancy”. The film crew and cast was full of passionate individuals hoping to achieve the best film possible. They had a deadline already set in stone by the premiere at a Science Fiction festival in Baltimore, but unfortunately, the composer they had worked with in the past had to drop out at the last minute.

This left them with a 45 minute or so film with no score to speak of and a little more than 2 weeks to complete it!

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