I have been working with Sound Radix on an issue with Auto Align Post 2 and have an update. I just wanted to keep people in the loop here too. I’ve provided them with reproduction steps and project files. We’ve figure out the root cause of the issue.
For those not following, there is an issue with Nuendo and AAP2 where seemingly randomly certain audio events are greyed out and cannot be synced. AAP2 returns “Alignment invalidated by edits”.
Response from Sound Radix:
The root of this is the issue is ARA2. ARA 2 was developed by Celemony mostly for vocal tuning with Melodyne, they made things easy for them so if the same audio file is re-used.
With Auto-Align Post, if there is a single audio file referenced in two separate events, sometimes, only the first original event will not give the ‘Alignment invalidated by edits’ message. We haven’t found an elegant way to bypass this yet.
To solve this, you can select the event that would not align, go to Audio → Bounce Selection → Replace.
Insert AAP on the bounced audio, the issue should be solved. We know this is not ideal, but that’s the workaround for now.
I’ll show it to one of our developers and if I’ll have anything interesting to add, I’ll let you know.
I let Sound Radix know that the challenge I have with this is that the first thing I do in every film project is to make a copy of the AAF import assets on a duplicate set of tracks and leave the originals hidden and at the bottom of the project. This is a standard workflow for most dialogue editors.
By “bouncing” the active work copies, it will destroy the handles for all hidden audio, which is mission critical to have during the dialogue editing process.
I do actually eventually end up with new copies of audio for every active edit track, but this is typically only after applying an initial round of AAP2. Meaning that my workflow is this:
- Import AAF
- Duplicate AAF import tracks, hide and disable the originals.
- Apply AAP2
- Nuendo says “this clip is uses elsewhere, do you want to start a new version: yes”
- This makes it so the active audio tracks are no longer tied to the same audio clips as the AAF archive.
But as you can see, this is a chicken vs egg problem.
I am wondering though, is there is a way in Nuendo to duplicate the audio tracks (essentially duplicate the pool for selected events) and KEEP all the hidden handle data. Basically this would be like when you’re editing a clip Nuendo knows is used elsewhere and Nuendo says “do you want to continue or use a new version”.
It looks like we need this, but as a general function. Not just when we’re applying FX.
In general this would be awesome, because I need this anyway to make sure that I’m not accidentally destroying the originals with things like noise reduction tools. But I’m not sure if this is possible with Nuendo today.
Cheers