> Film sound editors in movie post-production do not work the way you describe.
They don't generally lower fidelity. That is needed for video simply because the data sizes for video footage are so huge they are to work with.
But DAWs do let users "freeze", "consolidate" or otherwise pre-render effects so that everything does not need to be calculated in real-time on the fly.
I'm the original author of a DAW, so I'm more than familiar with what they do :)
Film sound editors do not do what you're describing. They work with typically 600-1000 tracks of audio. They do not lower fidelity, they do not pre-render. Ten years ago, one of the biggest post-production studios in Hollywood used TEN ProTools system to be able to function during this stage of the move production process.
They don't generally lower fidelity. That is needed for video simply because the data sizes for video footage are so huge they are to work with.
But DAWs do let users "freeze", "consolidate" or otherwise pre-render effects so that everything does not need to be calculated in real-time on the fly.