I’m actually excited for the N13 Update … at last it feels like real functional Post focused features are making their way into Nuendo!
The front and center attention to Voice production is SO welcome. The Voice channel, voice isolation and tone match … THANKYOU!!! ( yes I have other plugins but the reduced friction of doing it natively is great ). Dont stop there!
The ADR stuff is out of my league ( only just ) but next time I undertake some dialog replacement I’m going to go for it!! … again awesome
Track Versions for Video … um … not sure how it works, but if it makes comparing edits easier I’ll be over the moon!
Now … Ripple Edit… I know SB knows… I ‘feel’ it’s going to happen… please, before I retire!
Cargo Cult’s Matchbox is what you want if you’d like to compare two videos, and then also apply the changes to your Nuendo session. I can’t recommend it enough!
If you’re comparing versions then one thing you can do if your editor has provided a rough mix from the NLE sequence’s timeline is to take the two mixes and flip the phase on one and just quickly bounce out a version of that. Anything that is different will show, all else will be minus infinity (nulled). Another thing you could try is to run the function for creating markers from edits, and perhaps it’ll be easier to find differences there compared to video frames…
The other one is versions. That’s been exploding in recent years with all the social content. On the picture side at times we end up with 600 different versions for delivery, which are variations of ratios, lengths, supers, etc.
So I appreciate the multiple versions of the video track for that, though those workflows can get even more insane. Over on the Flame side we have connected conform, where you can take various timelines and the software figures out shared sections and separate sections so you only have to edit once. Not sure how this translates into sound. Would be an interesting discussion, but getting off topic here.
Supposedly $200 is the standard upgrade price. Last upgrade there was a window of time to get it at $150. That seemed like a much more reasonable upgrade price. I know Nuendo has lots of Post Production features but I am mostly getting it for the Cubase features which is only $99. For me, I very much would like $150 for price point for an upgrade but that is just my opinion. I also wish Nuendo would sometimes introduce music features ahead of Cubase. Why not have Nuendo as the ultimate Post Production AND Music program with a little leg up on Cubase in this regard? That would be a plus for me .
I bet the segregation in the market place comes down to protecting the brands. I’m guessing it was and still is easier to get post-sound market share using the Nuendo brand rather than Cubase. A lot has to do with perception.
You are quite correct! I guess my thoughts were ‘locked’ on the former.
At my level ( low budget ) I try to insist on Picture Lock when I start the heavy work … you can imagine how successful I am at that!! TBH when a new “Version” ( cut) arrives I A/B them in a NLE and work out what has to be nipped and tucked. Seems odd I know, but over time it’s proved to be the most efficient way to calculate what is going on!
However to your point, of course there are also completely separate cuts of some projects, which I guess storing in Video Version tracks could be useful. Though I have a sinking feeling that managing all the audio for these would be overwhelming? I think I’d prefer a Project per version … just copy/paste comments elements from one to the other. Perhaps I have a simple brain…
For new cuts and low budget work what you can maybe do is have the editors output EDLs and then just use Nuendo’s re-conform workflow. I’ve noticed that with a lot of video editors and their assistants you have to spell things out literally and highlight and then still they’ll miss things - but it is doable.
For short form content I typically won’t bother and instead just compare video or audio, but for longer form content it really does make sense to do it that way. You just have to communicate clearly with your editor on the other side.
When it comes to multiple versions / cuts I often just copy-paste onto new locations on the timeline. If there’s one version that starts at 1hr in the AAF I receive I might place v2 at hour 2. That way it’s far easier to copy-paste elements across all projects, and, in fact, where there are just the one narrator for example you can have a single change on your one track with that narrator (EQ for example) and it’ll cover the entire timeline and all versions, no need to copy-paste even. The only drawback is that the embedded timecode will be off by an hour. Most of the time that doesn’t seem to matter for the work I do.
Anyway, I agree with you that using track versions for video and audio would be really messy. Just figuring out how to deal with automation makes it a non-starter for me. If it was only stems that were being “healed” then ‘whatever’, but if it’s the actual mix with automation it gets messy. (talking about versions now, not re-conforms)
Indeed. The use case they demonstrated at launch does exist, but the devil is very much in the detail. So making the tools truly fit those use cases at scale (meaning multiple studios with different ways of doing things), is a huge task.
Having just cut-down a 2hr PBS show into a 1hr PBS show we had to do a lot of that. We did use an EDL, though slightly differently (not relevant here). But the take away from that is, while you can cut up the picture side pretty cleanly in those circumstances, the sound side is a bigger mess, because things flow across multiple cuts. It took a lot of work to re-connect the music in a logical way, prevent atmo from being chopped up randomly, various cross fades. It’s just not that simple.
Oh, absolutely. The way I look at it is that using something like the built-in re-conform or Matchbox or whatever at least can place large chunks of content in its right place, accurately down to the frame, and then you’ll have to do some possibly significant work across all of those edits. But we’d have to do those edits anyway and between the new EDL re-conform and a new AAF it’ll sometimes be less work than doing it “manually”.
To date I’ve worked with exactly 1 video editor who correctly wrote down all edits in a cutdown/re-edit and it was easy to follow. And that’s over two decades plus worth of work.
Exactly. The Nuendo re-conform works pretty good, but everything has to be setup perfectly.
In this show, what we did is actually do the cut-down (alt 1hr edit) on a rendered version of the show in Avid (new sequence with just a ProRes render laid down on track 1). Then we exported an EDL for that timeline. When you do it that way the program timecode in the EDL is the new position and the source timecode is the old position of each segment. So I just rebuilt the new show starting at 3:00:00:00 of the Nuendo timeline, with the original still at 1:00:00:00. So it was just a matter of typing (copy/paste) three time codes for each cut in the bottom play bar and then using range copy/paste which I mapped to my surface. Took less than 20min to rebuild the whole thing and then had the 2hr show in the front and the 1hr show in the back to refine.
The video editor than followed the same process in Avid to rebuild the picture side. Everything matched. Since this was a show that had been built over 10 years in Avid it’s pretty messy and we didn’t want to touch the original edit as we cut things down.
Thanks for the responses here. I have enjoyed the conversation about dealing with picture changes and iterations very much.
In fact I created a new Topic " Working with Picture Iterations" where hopefully we can continue.
Thinking about workflows also jogged my memory of an application called “Change List” by Intelligent Assistance which might be very helpful to some of you. ( for projects coming from Premiere/FCP … sorry Avid ).
TBH when a new “Version” ( cut) arrives I A/B them in a NLE and work out what has to be nipped and tucked. Seems odd I know, but over time it’s proved to be the most efficient way to calculate what is going on!