Hi Friends.
I am eager to try to switch from PT to Nuendo, for internal smaller projects, that doesnt need collaboration with other facilities.
One major thing that I use ALOT in Pro Tools is the “Clip Effects” tool.
It is just so damn quick and always visible. As soon as you select a clip in the timeline, you can quickly adjust it in 5 sec, without any need for opening up a plugin and then render etc…
Sometimes its a bout just EQing one consonant in a word, that has an ugly freq node.
Doing so with automation on an EQ, that is too fragile in my opinion.
Does Nuendo have any feature like that?
Thank you for your time!
//Ted
Yes, we call it the Direct Offline Process. You can apply the effects to the selected Audio Event (in Cubase/Nuendo, the clip is the representation of the whole Audio file in the Pool; Audio Event is the event – most probably already cut – in the project).
In Direct Offline Process, you can set up your favourites effects (and the values) or even a chain of effects (and the values). Then you can easily apply it by hitting a Key Command. So you can for example assign a Key Command to:
+3dB (if you hit it by a Key Command and it’s not enough, you hit the Key Command again)
-3dB
EQ with specific settings (increase 1kHz by 3dB)
EQ with another specific setting (decrease 2kHz by 3dB)
Normalize
Apply Male DeEsser
Apply Female Chain
etc.
Then just by hitting assigned Key Commands, you can quickly shape the sound of the given Audio Event. Of course,e you can select multiple Audio Events and process them at once.
Hi Martin.
Thank you so much for your thoroughly written answer!
Great stuff!
Follow up Question:
Can the “Direct offline processing” window always stay open with the the chosen EQ enabled, and follow the clips I have selected?
In other words can I skip the step of telling the “DOP” window that I want to choose an EQ each time a new clip is being selected? If YES, then it would in practice be the same thing as PT. Wich would be AWESOME!
Im sure a macro Command would solve this too though, but just wondering how the basics work.
Regarding CPU:
If some simple 4 band EQing is being made to lets say 500-1000 clips during a feature film. will that suck a lot of CPU or make Nuendo behave differently from your experience?
Fortunately in Pro Tools, I dont notice too much of a difference with heavy use of “Clip Effects”
I’m sorry, I don’t know Pro Tools and its workflow, so I cannot tell, how close is Nuendo’s Direct Offline Process.
You can keep Direct Offline Process (DOP) window open. But it doesn’t stay with the EQ. Once you select another Audio Event, the DOP window shows the process(es) applied on the given Audio Event. What is useful. But you don’t have to (in my opinion) keep the DOP window open at all (if you don’t want to inspect what has been applied). You can just fire the Key Commands with your presets. So the workflow is:
Select an Audio Event
Hit Audition Key Command to listen to it.
Hit Key Command A to apply process/effect A.
Audition.
Hit Key Command A to apply process/effect A again (becafuse it wasn’t enough).
Hit Key Command B to apply process/effect B.
Audition.
Select the next Audio Event
…
I hope, you got the idea of the workflow.
The DOP means, the effect is going to be applied to the Audio Event directly. So the effects are not going to be processed in the real-time anymore. So they don’t load the CPU at all. The new file with applied process/plug-in is rendered and used in backgroud (the file is stored in the Edits) folder. Of course, if you want to change the process/plug-ins chain, Nuendo uses the original source and re-render it with the new chain. So you can always get back to the original one.
(sorry for repeating what Martin said, if that’s what I’m doing)
I don’t think the window can stay up. The reason (I thin) is that Nuendo has unlimited undo on a per-clip basis, as opposed to PT’s global undo (unless it changed recently). This means that as soon as you choose a different clip the DOP window will show a different process list. All processes are shown in the list in the left side of the window. No process - no listing.
You can however set up both presets and use key commands to pull up some specific plugins. For example - I have RX Mouth DeClick as a key command which will open the DOP window. It remembers the last setting used and I have another key command for “apply” to… well… apply the setting. So PT has a big advantage in clip effects in one way and Nuendo in another. In Nuendo it’s two key commands for me to declick a clip, or denoise or whatever I’ve set up, and then I also have access to the individual steps retroactively in that list. So you can always undo ‘out of order’ if you want.
Nuendo is great but you’ll likely get slowed down at first trying to do things your way. I think it’s best to just get it and run it in demo mode and just spend time editing and try to figure out how best to do things in Nuendo. Sometimes you just have to change certain things in your workflow.
Clip Effects are realtime, DOP offline. It’s fast enough but not realtime. Changes the audition process probably.
We are probably using a bit different terminology here. The window remains open (this is for sure). And it updates its content based on the selected Audio Event.
You can enable Auto Apply in the DOP window. So this step is not necessary at all.
This is big advantage of the DOP implementation in my opinion.
As you can see you have EQ, Filters and Dynamics always visible for any clip selected.
No, but it is what I prefer since I don’t want all effects to auto-apply. Unless of course it’s on a per-effect basis which I missed in that case.
I think that depends on how you see it. While it saves CPU cycles and gives us an undo list etc. I would have preferred clip effects in Nuendo as an alternative. The benefit is being able to just grab that effect and start tweaking it without having to choose to audition it or waiting for it to process the clip - even though the latter is often quick.
For this case, you can disable the Auto Apply in Nuendo. The Audition is processed in real time and once you are happy, you can “render” it by clicking to Apply.
Martin and Mattias.
Thank you so much for taking your time discussing and giving lot of great info. I understand much better now.
I actually just went ahead and bought Nuendo 12 on the sale.
It seems in this specific regard, PT is defenitely having an advantage with it´s “Clip Effects” however, it is kind of still doable in Nuendo but I see one major drawback:
Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that, when you are working with a clip in DOP and audition the clip, you will not audition it through it´s active routing chain with sends, and insert effects, instead you will hear the clip in it´s original state without the routing. Is that correct?
In that case you will be missing out on crucial shaping that has been made in the active domain, so you will most likely make wrong decisions inside DOP when applying effects.
You’re absolutely right, @Ted.Krotkiewski - but I think most of us would see DOP as a tool for preparing audio for the actual “live” mix, like restauration tasks, pre-filtering and the like. In this context monitoring through the active insert- and routing-chain is not that important.
Yes, you are right and it works as specified this way. The idea (to playback the dry signal and solo it) behind is to allow us to listen to the source signal, we are really processing. If you want to hear the whole signal chain, you can use the common playback. The Left-Right Locators can follow the selection. So if the Cycle is enabled, you can play it back in a cycle and once you select the next Audio Event, the Cycle would follow.
I agree with Dietz that often it’s preparing things for the realtime mix, for me as well at least. I typically use it for restoration and occasionally also to render reverb tails on music stings for example. EQ and compression I still do realtime on inserts.
But yeah, it would have been nice to have preview function with the full chain active. Also, if I remember correctly the DOP doesn’t take clip gain into account, so if you use a process with a dynamic threshold I think you could get different results if you just do it as-is on a clip with clip gain or if you “consolidate” (PT)/ “bounce” (Nuendo) the clip first since that changes the level of it.
