I've got a project in MC8.5. Let's say I loop record so I get 10 takes of a vocal. Each vocal consist of 10 lyrical lines, or "swappable units" from a comping perspective.
I will start by listening to all 10 takes of line 1. I slice all 10 files at the end of line 1. Then, for the ones I want to Melodyne, one by one, I
-- select the 1-line clip
-- press Control+w to mix it in place to its own clip , so that I don't have to Melodyne the whole wav in the next step
-- activate Melodyne this one clip and tweak the pitch etc
-- again Control+w to mix it to its own clip, as a way to "print" the Melodyne changes, so that I don't need to keep Melodyne "live" on that clip; when you use Melodyne a lot of places, having it "live" in too many places can use a lot of PC resources, I believe. (I learned this the hard way once in the past by having a file with many “live” Melodyned edits get corrupted, costing me a lot of work .)
This is all a pretty standard workflow. When I finish auditioning a Line 1 clip, whether I Melodyne it or not, I make sure to Control + w it. I do this because the way slicing audio clips works in MC8, if I slice a clip into a segment, without then Control +w-ing it, that segment is always expandable, buy dragging one of its edges, to become the whole clip it originated from; in other words, I could drag from the right hand side and extend it from being just the clip of a take of line 1, into a long one with all lines, 1-10. I don't need that. So after I review any clip, whether I Melodyne it or not, I render it as its own clip.
Problem is, sometimes this will cause my MX8 project files sizes to become massive. If, for example, immediately after recording the 10 takes, but before any of this editing, the MX8 file size is 30 MB, it will, as I edit as I describe, grow by 1-2 MB every time I save something; and other times, for reasons I do not understand, it will double in size, and sometimes even, again, for reasons I don’t understand, will halve in size. Usually though it just grows. All I’m doing is slicing clips, sometimes Melodyning them, and rendering them. I'm not knowingly adding any new material.
It's getting out of hand. The 30 MB original file in my example has grown to around 350 MB!
And I’m only a third of the way through the comping. Projects are taking a long time to save and program sometimes lags at these sizes. Does anyone who has actually experienced this know what’s going on? How can I avoid this? I need to find a way to "print" a Melodyne-edited snippet because I use Melodyne all over the place. Perhaps some of my assumptions about efficiency-through-rendering are flawed. But I'd be grateful for advice here. There's no obvious reason for the file to grow so much. When I follow the workflow in Sonar, this doesn't happen
