PowerCore Plug-ins aren't represented in Exports?

Question

Maaaaaaannnnnnnnn! I was just beginning to forgive Audition CS5 for the feature-botomy it pulled on us. Is anyone else getting this problem? I use TC Electronics PowerCore plug-ins, which, similar to UAD plug-ins, are processed through an additional PCI-e card. I can enable the plug-ins in CS5.5, and even hear them while I am mixing. But when I try to export my mix, they aren't there. It sounds the same as if I had disabled all of my PowerCore plug-ins right before I exported. And it doesn't matter which of them I am using. It doesn't include any of them in the export. I have tried multiple workarounds... mixing down effects busses first, mixing down the master bus, doing an overall session export, pre-rendering tracks, etc. Doesn't work. It's all the same. A beautifully reverbed and compressed mix exports completely dry and punchless. And there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. Can anyone else verify that this is happening, and does it affect other third-party plug-in PCI cards? Any ideas for a fix? 

Answer 1

I have a work-around. Pre-render does nothing to solve the final issue because I think Audition re-renders all effects in export (as it should for best sound quality). My work-around is not ideal, but it does allow me to at least use CS5.5 with my current setup (albeit very inconveniently):
1) For least annoyance, go to preferences and uncheck the box in "Effects" that stipulates that Audition should process disabled effects. This way you can have all your effects preset, and disable all of them but one or two without processing the disabled effects.
2) Make sure you have no more than two cells of your DSP processing accessed. Then bounce down the indivual busses or tracks that have the third-party plugins in them. Do this individually, monitoring your plug-in application to make sure that it is not being asked to process more than it has capacity for. Then listen to your bounce downs to make sure they are exactly the same as the original busses or tracks (sometimes this requires "exclusive soloing" to be checked in your preferences... especially if you have pre-fader sends to effects busses). Mute the old busses and tracks and disable their effects, but don't delete them in case you need to make changes later. Then enable the next one or two effects, and keep doing this process until all the third-party plugins are represented as .wav files in the mix.
3) Do this only at the mixdown stage... the mixing process should be unaffected for the most part. This also allows you (conceivably) to use more than just four cells of processing on a given track.
4) On the other hand, you could have twice as many DSP chips as you needed for mixing. For instance, I could buy another PCI-e card to be used for the Export process, and then pretend I only have one card while I am mixing (yeah, right!).
Adobe could do the following to fix this problem:
1) Allow for single-thread processing mode in mixdown.
2) Allow for use of "Rendered" tracks during mixdown. This would be a native version of my workaround. Rather than going to the source for every export, the user could have the option of exporting the final with a combination of rendered tracks and unrendered tracks.
Message was edited by: Cubed Root Sound