Help! I finished a mondo 5.1 film mix for DVD in January and am now doing the touchup mixes for a theatrical release. This project, which uses nearly every track and return plus six Buss Extensions in XY panning, always pushed my system to its limits, but now it's virtually unworkable. Absolutely nothing has changed in the EDL with regards to track count or CPU-hungry FX, yet I'm seeing high MT Loads in sparse areas of the mix and quick spikes to buffer underruns in places that defy logic.

I've done everything I can think of to reduce the load, though because of the dynamic 5.1 panning I can't print as many effected tracks as I'd like. Of course I've altered the buffers ad nauseum, tried single CPU on and off, tried switching to the ASIO driver, and even reinstalled SS 4.0c in case it had something to do with 4.1. No change. Certain plugins, particularly Waves, seem to be particularly hungry, yet I still see bizarre CPU loads even after completely removing many of them. Much of the demanding reverb is being handled by the UAD-1, which is never running at a high load.

What could possibly have changed in my system to cause this drop in performance? I'm out of ideas, so I'm open to any suggestions***8212;but my system already has all of Bob's tweaks applied and, as I said, I was able to get through this project much better a few months back.