I’m noticing that times or merging channels (basically adding new channels to a top) and renaming (even renaming a single channel) are higher than I’d like them to be - especially the merge.
Anyone can suggest alternative techniques that are faster to do the two operations above?
tx
d
you mean CHOPs, right?
I found that using a select CHOP (with multiple select turned on) can be faster than a merge CHOP. You’ll need to follow the select by another select CHOP to fix the channel names: rename from ::* to *(2)
Also, someone recommend to always use the select CHOP for renaming (instead of the rename CHOP)
The Replace CHOP is much faster. The limitation is that you need to know all the channel names you will be dealing with and put them all into a Constant CHOP with some default value.
Then you merge in your channel stream (with the real values) into the second input of the Replace CHOP. Use multiple downstream Replace CHOPs to merge multiple CHOPs. Its not pretty, but its much faster than the Merge CHOP.
thanks ben - unfortunately I’m talking about 850 channels so a constant chop and replace is out of the questions (for sane individuals 
).
Achims suggestions worked great.
For the future, it would be nice to have a “append unmatched” option for the replace chop? Or simply a constant chop that takes more than 40 channels at a time. One could do the merge and snap it into the constant, then - on a frame by frame basis - have two replace (if your original merge had two inputs) - each replacing a subset of the constant chop chans.
If you’re concerned about dynamic UI for the constant chop, why not to a “snap” chop that’s the same as the constant chop but it doesn’t allow you to view/edit the chans. I bet it would be easy to implement, and one could snapshot as many channels as one wants in it.
oh wait! that’s already possible! It’s called the “lock” flag! That can already be done!!!
I’m pretty stupid, d’oh! so I can snapshot the merged channels just once then have two replace chops instead of one merge with two inputs!
now, the difference with the “snap” chop would be a little flag that says - re-snap if the number of channels change (very fast) and resnap if the names change (slower), because the problem often is that when doing this locking tricks one forgets about it…but with the auto-snap options in place that would be solved.
d
hold CHOP?
You can lock any CHOP with all the channels or use the Constant CHOP’s Snap function and it’s a 1-click affair.
snap can only capture 40 channels
Good point, locking is the only option.