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SD 788T File Type Question


tourtelot

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Why have I, for close to 20 years, had my Sound Devices 788T set to Poly .Wav?  I record acoustic music on my 788T now exclusively, and while Pro Tools doesn't have any problems importing a Poly .Wav file onto separate tracks, my DAW of choice, Reaper, needs to have the Poly files split by (still going strong) Wave Agent.  Not a big deal but an extra step.

 

So why was I alway solidly against printing Mono .Wav files on my 788T?

 

Re-set the 788T to Mono .Wav files for the next job.  Can't see why not.  Why not?

 

Getting old.  CRS.  Can't remember shit!

 

D.

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Tourtelot,

Most of my clients prefer poly waves. They say easier for them for media management. When I edit, I prefer mono wav. but then I know what I recorder and only drag in the isolated lavs and iso booms I need.

 

I have the luxury of being able to record poly to one memory card and mono to a second on my SD664.

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For Reaper, I've found it convenient to use track sends to break out a poly file to individual tracks.  Works great for mixing; the only quirk is that the waveforms only show in the original track, so *editing* is less smooth.

It's a bit of extra setup, but easier to deal with than pre-processing with Wave Agent.

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I believe if you have a high track count, at least "back in the day" with CF cards of that era, writing say 10-12 mono wav files simultaneously could potentially cause issues vs just writing one big file?  I'd imagine with a modern CF card, that wouldn't be an issue anymore though considering the data rate of 12x 24bit/48khz files is comically low vs even what a low end 4k mirrorless writes a second.

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I I ddon't have Reaper in front of me, but can't you make polyfiles as takes? I mean you can view each channel as a separate take? So that in one track you could have 8 channels, and select the channel you want as a take... This might be a dream I've had

 

Nope. Not a dream. And maybe not the thing you're looking for, but if anyone's interested, here's how you do this thing: 

Import your poly-file to a track, 
image.png

 

Right click, choose "Item Processing > Explode multichannel audio or MIDI items to new one-channel items"
image.png

The files will appear below your original poly file as a folder track with the names of the channels as track names and the original poly file muted

image.png

 

Now you can select the separate mono files

Right click, choose "Take > Implode items across tracks into takes"

image.png

 

I see this being useful for dialog editing, where you can easily just choose the channel you want very easily. The way Reaper uses takes is excellent IMHO. 

 

image.png

 

And you can easily make a macro (Custom Action as it's called in Reaper) where you do all of this at once. 

 

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8 minutes ago, Wandering Ear said:

I say you are recording, and ingesting, so you get to do whatever you want!  
I’ve recorded mono bwav on the 788 in the past, the data rate to the cf card should be the same, except for a tiny bump of metadata at the opening and closing of files. 


Yes, the data rate is the same, but the way the data gets written under the hood involves large numbers of small writes rather than one large write.  This makes a difference in processing overhead, which can cause dropouts if the card isn't fast enough.  As someone else mentioned, it's not likely to be an issue with modern cards, but there's still some very low quality media out there that might not be up to snuff.

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59 minutes ago, The Documentary Sound Guy said:


Yes, the data rate is the same, but the way the data gets written under the hood involves large numbers of small writes rather than one large write.  This makes a difference in processing overhead, which can cause dropouts if the card isn't fast enough.  As someone else mentioned, it's not likely to be an issue with modern cards, but there's still some very low quality media out there that might not be up to snuff.

I thought that was only an issue on spinning disks and not solid state?  I guess i could see the write controller getting overwhelmed, i  just haven’t seen it except on disks. 

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4 hours ago, Wandering Ear said:

I thought that was only an issue on spinning disks and not solid state?


It's definitely *more* of an issue on spinning disks, but small writes slow down on just about every medium.  As I recall, one quirk of CF cards is that the controller is built into the card itself, not the reader, which, aside from making the cards way more expensive, also means that performance guarantees aren't as reliable.

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