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Spitfire HZ01 RAM Performance & Workflow

windyweekend

windyweekend

Active Member
I'm about to fork out some hard earned cash on the Spitfire HZ Bundle, but before I do I have a dumb question for those infinitely wiser than I - having looked at the demos, I see that each patch loads about 4 or 5 instruments. The demo seems to show about ~75MB RAM used up per mic, so if you turn on two of the mics then you use ~150MB and ~225MB for three mics etc.

Onto my question - If you want, for example, 3 of those instruments in the patch, I'm guessing you'd need to load either three separate Kontakt tracks (or I'm hoping one rack) each with a different instrument. Does this mean that you're loading the 225MB for the entire patch regardless of how many instruments you use from it, or are you loading the 225MB for each instrument (therefore 675MB for three instruments with 3 mics each)?

If I'm going to buy the bundle I've got a bad feeling I'm going to want to use lots of it all at once (I'm salivating if the SF demos are half of what the reality is), which means my RAM is going to hit the roof real quickly (I've got 10GB). Does anyone have any opinions on this who have the HZ percussion products?

Thanks all.

Windy.
Click to read more...
 
If you loaded multiple patches with the same samples it still loads them in. The multiple instrument patches do allow you to unload each one separately however, they include the separate instrument patches which is what you should you use in this case. Using the separate instrument patches might also reduce the footprint from the patch itself (which isn't shown in Kontakt's memory meter) compared to the multiple instrument patches. In this case it's probably not much but I know that on the Evo grid libraries the main Evo patch takes up around 100MB if I remember correctly while the single Evo patches which use the BML framework take up almost nothing. With the first Evo library they haven't updated it to include the individual patches so if you wanted to load them separately into your template you'd have to use the full grid patches which would take up a ridiculous amount of ram.
 
The sound is indeed excellent. What holds me back from fully utilising it is the way the drums are organised.

With this drum library if you load a drum group patch, say Taikos each type is only accessible via keyswitch. Which means you can only play one drum at a time, daft. So you need to load up multiple Kontakt instruments and split out by midi channel. A bit wasteful and results in lots of tracks especially as each patch only has a few active keys.

With their percussion product using the Kickstarter engine, the drum group patches have several drums spread across the keyboard e.g. Low Drums such as Bass Drum, Toms etc. Also you can remap drums to anywhere on the keyboard.

I was hoping they might address this in an update, but it looks increasingly unlikely.
 
windyweekend said:
Onto my question - If you want, for example, 3 of those instruments in the patch, I'm guessing you'd need to load either three separate Kontakt tracks (or I'm hoping one rack) each with a different instrument. Does this mean that you're loading the 225MB for the entire patch regardless of how many instruments you use from it, or are you loading the 225MB for each instrument (therefore 675MB for three instruments with 3 mics each)?
Click to expand...

The group patches are great for auditioning drums because you can switch really quickly, but I tend to use the individual patches. Also when you unload a drum from the group patch it removes the samples from your RAM (same as if you purged one of the microphones you are not using), so you wouldn't have your RAM getting overloaded with repeated loading of the same samples.
The Taiko Ensemble patch for example, with two microphones runs at 15.58mb of RAM for me.


Gerhard Westphalen said:
If you loaded multiple patches with the same samples it still loads them in.
Click to expand...

Does it? I always thought that if the samples were already in RAM kontakt would not reload them. Obviously the new instance of kontakt itself would use RAM, but it would just use the already loaded samples? What about when you duplicate a patch inside a single Kontakt instance?

procreative said:
With this drum library if you load a drum group patch, say Taikos each type is only accessible via keyswitch. Which means you can only play one drum at a time, daft. So you need to load up multiple Kontakt instruments and split out by midi channel. A bit wasteful and results in lots of tracks especially as each patch only has a few active keys.
Click to expand...

I agree. It would be great if the 'all in one' patch had the drums spread across the entire keyboard but only being able to play one articulation at a time seems pointless. You can move the keys btw, it's under 'transpose' in the options tab.
 
JoeBarlow said:
Does it? I always thought that if the samples were already in RAM kontakt would not reload them. Obviously the new instance of kontakt itself would use RAM, but it would just use the already loaded samples? What about when you duplicate a patch inside a single Kontakt instance?
Click to expand...
I just tested it and it seems that you're right. It doesn't duplicate them and it appears to not duplicate them even if they're in different instances. I didn't think the multiple instances would be able to communicate with each other on what was loaded already. The patches themselves do add ram when they're duplicated though.
 
Are you saying you're held back by the need for an extra midi channel? So what? Many of the composers widely admired here use thousands of midi tracks, using folders to hide them when not in use. This is a non-problem from my perspective.

Use one Kontakt instance for all sounds of a particular patch, then delete the samples from each multi-keyswitch you're not using to avoid duplication in RAM.
 
JohnG said:
Are you saying you're held back by the need for an extra midi channel? So what? Many of the composers widely admired here use thousands of midi tracks, using folders to hide them when not in use. This is a non-problem from my perspective.
Click to expand...

Well you are entitled to your opinion, but while I have no problem using articulations over many midi channels if I have to, its rather inefficient to have each track only triggering at best about 8 notes.

Personally anything I can do to minimise track counts for similar or same instruments I will do. I have used folder tracks but you still have to open/close them and that can itself become tedious.

Spitfire Percussion is a comparable product and this along with most other drum libraries has patches that group by drum range. Having a spread of drums across the keyboard is much more conducive to sketching.

And before you say "you can remap them so they do not clash" why should I have to do that to get a product to work how it really should to start with.

I could not care less what "widely respected composers" do as everyone has their own workflow. That does not take away from what I (and evidently some others) perceive as a flaw in the design.
 
Thanks for the feedback folks. This was my first post and I'm glad I've obviously come to the right place! Everybody's comments make sense and I see the various perspectives. Without actually owning the product I can see why they may have only used a few keys for each patch and have tried to keep them the same ones as much as possible rather than spreading them around. This is actually my pet hate with Damage (having to hunt around for that one sound I'm after up and down the keyboard), so I'd actually be quite happy with loading more midi channels if I know each one is using roughly the same notes for each instrument. Sounds like a thought through design in principle. The biggest risk I see is RAM hogging but it sounds like with loading individual patches I can work around this. Bottom line - you've all solved this issue (so thanks everyone).

Now I need to spend a few sleepless nights deciding whether to upgrade my strings from Kontakt factory (ugh) to Mural OR to upgrade my percussion to the HZ Bundle (those Ensembles are massive and JB sounds HUGE) before I fork out close to $1000. From what I'm hearing, Spitfire sounds like a good choice either way. The only thing I've noticed listening to some of the mural demos folks have posted is that they sound a little over processed compared to other products, but I don't get enough quantity time sitting in front of a full orchestra to tell in reality, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. If anyone has opinions on that one I'd love to hear them.

Thanks for the HZ inputs one way or another. I'm sold.
 
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I'm going to ask my last question a little differently and see what sticks - I do a lot of film scoring, mainly shorts, and am starting to get some good work coming up with some Features covering all sorts of genres, from romance to action, thrillers and one SciFi, but feel I'm really pushing the boundaries of my current libs. I have Komplete and Damage but want to take the next step into some more quality sounds. If you had the choice between upgrading your strings or your percussion (both of which are limited with the above tools), which would YOU do given the choice? Is it a better philosophy to upgrade each instrument type to something REALLY good (e.g. HZ) or continue to upgrade the whole roster a little bit but across everything (I.e. Albion One)? Big jar of peanut butter or small tin of caviar?

I know this question has many wide ranging variables, so please be gentle with me....
 
To answer your last question, I guess if I were to simplify your question to upgrading strings or percussion first, I would say strings. My logic is that percussional libraries that are not top shelf, or are dated can be helped by additional processing more so than strings. Others may disagree, but that's been my experience.
 
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Gerhard Westphalen said:
I just tested it and it seems that you're right. It doesn't duplicate them and it appears to not duplicate them even if they're in different instances. I didn't think the multiple instances would be able to communicate with each other on what was loaded already.
Click to expand...
This only works if (and works because) they share the same process space. If your DAW does VST bridging for each separate Kontakt instance, then the samples would be loaded in the separate processes, using separate memory. Kontakt doesn't used shared memory for samples. (Kind of unfortunate.)
 
If you're planning to buy some Spitfire Audio and want to save money, check out Audiodeluxe.com, they have them on sale...
 
windyweekend said:
If you had the choice between upgrading your strings or your percussion (both of which are limited with the above tools), which would YOU do given the choice?
Click to expand...

While I think that a good string library becomes the core of a composers template due to flexibility, I'm going to go against the grain and say if I were you I would probably go with a good percussion library.
The kontakt 5 legacy "Modwheel X-Fade" string patches are actually pretty good. You can also adjust the volume control of the legacy legato patches to be cc1 controlled, rather than velocity.
On the other hand the kontakt 5 factory percussion is pretty awful.

It depends on what style of music you compose. If you use percussion as a background element for emphasis then strings will be more important to you but if you want to compose things with big, in your face percussion, I would say the kontakt string stuff is serviceable enough to work still.

windyweekend said:
Is it a better philosophy to upgrade each instrument type to something REALLY good (e.g. HZ) or continue to upgrade the whole roster a little bit but across everything (I.e. Albion One)?
Click to expand...

Seems like you have a solid foundation with Ultimate as it is, so upgrade your libraries section by section I would say.
 
I would suggest spending money on something your going to keep long term, rather than something you'll want to upgrade eventually. I agree with Procreative, the lack of an ensemble patch it what kept me from buying HZ01, though I really like the sound. It just slows down my workflow and is kind of a "creative killer" to work with separate patches. I didn't realize you could move the keys and build an ensemble patch, but at the price they charge it would be great to have a clearly laid out factory patch.

If you really want to upgrade from Komplete perhaps check out Cinematic Strings 2 or CinePerc. They are both solid, sound great, and include separate and ensemble patches.
https://www.cinematicstrings.com

https://cinesamples.com/products

Some other perc suggestions are here...
https://vi-control.net/community/threads/percussion-libraries.51214/
 
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