I’m very excited by the new features in Nuendo 14. auto mix, dialogue transcription, video and media bay import are the main ones for “pro” use.
Wich brings me to the DAWproject that I never saw before. Got super excited with that for Nuendo to Protools.. but it’s not possible.
All mix audithoriums use Protools. Lucky we have Yellow Cab in Paris with Nuendo !!!
But I had some deals shutdown in other European cities because I was using Nuendo and there’s simply no one using it, nor a database of steinberg listing studios offering nuendo systems. Only thing for me is to waste days exporting AAF and tidious work to resolve errors and import it to Protools and waste days making sure all is set properly for mix.
WHY isn’t Steinberg breaking that limitation by offering a specific dedicated Protools export ? Is it legal issues ? It doesn’t have to be all plugins and what not but a basic, tracks, track lanes, routing, automations, clip gains would be perfect to send sound editing to mix.
Is it because Steinberg is concerned it would reinforce PT superiority knowing Nuendo can adapt ? Anyway it is already 99% of studios using it..
We had OMF from the dinosaur era, with its many and significant limitations.
Afterwards, in prehistory, we had AAF, with fewer limitations, working so-so depending on which software exported and imported it…
And in (I believe) 2023, dawproject came out. According to its page,
it seems promising and can export more parameters…
Doing Pro Tools sessions in Nuendo or vice versa, I think would not be possible due to programming complexities and a lack of interest from each company.
However, developing the ability to export and import dawproject depends solely on each company that has its DAW because it is completely OPEN. Avid is one of them.
And I would dare to say that Avid has zero interest in doing it. It is not interested in leaving its system.
I’ll finish by saying that, compared to Pro Tools, I see Nuendo as superior in many facets.
Converting DAW sessions is not as simple as converting wav to mp3. The technical details of Avid’s .ptx session format are proprietary and I suspect it’s both a technical as well as legal nightmare to reverse-engineer Avid’s closed session format and offer inofficial support in a major third party DAW. The only way this is going to happen is if Avid adopts import/export for a modern open session format like dawproject. So the best way would be to make your voice heard at Avid.
Yeah nuendo rocks ! beeing able to save all prefs shortcuts and macro makes the session so tailored anywhere you mix that it’s heaven and fast to work with it !
I am starting to consider this scenario myself, as my work at this stage involves creating standalone and multi-track stems, that are playable in any DAW but the point about automations, lanes and gains, in particular (not routing) does make me think that to change DAW mid-flight, does mean more work has to be done on the originating side, ie., Steinberg, and for reasons outlined in this topic, there will likely never be a universal format, especially where AVID is concerned because they want to protect their market.
In my view, it starts with education. I don’t know how many colleges around the world toe the line about there being an “industry standard”, but one would assume almost all and while I know from experience that the pro-tools system is a robust system, it is nonetheless hardware-based, and rather exclusive so buying into it as a novice, i would never recommend.
In fact, I would recommend starting out with Steinberg, because you can choose your own hardware, and you won’t have to continually upgrade your system just to stay on top of developments and the evidence is in the fact that any decent plug-in starts out as a VST and is ported to other formats, such as Audio Units (AU) so if you write your own songs and you want access to the most diverse sounds and effects, start with Steinberg.
There, are other DAW’s such as Ableton, but to maintain compatibility VST is recommended so if you are serious about your songs, don’t opt for exclusively proprietary solutions.
Fun story about my sound engineering school I did in the 90’s. It was PT5 or so at the time. We had da88 and tapes on the side. PT was here for few audio tracks and plugins.
Years after finishing school I was able to buy my first PT6 and digi one. I was missing the midi but had my atari and cubase 2.0 on the side
Then I go back to school meet teachers and brag about my setup but learned they went full nuendo.. that was in 2000 something ! I didn’t even knew at the time cubase went forward ! So I tried it and loved it so much I used Nuendo for decades now. So some schools can take the leap and lead the way..
I don’t know about Mac, but I can’t see ASIO working very well with PT.
On a side note, I use Davinci Resolve for still-image videos and I was thrilled when an ASIO driver was made available, only to be disappointed with the performance on Windows.
I hope the situation will be addressed when WoA, becomes more commonplace, in relation to a native ASIO driver.
I don’t use midi I’m exporting sound editing to go to mix for films.
I do this once a year. I try to avoid it as much as I can so it’s not a straight forward process that I can recall from top of my head. I just know that there’s many issues to avoid.
I try to make sure when editing that all files are quantized to frames,
I avoid files that have strange characters or rename them.
All DOP burned in off course.
in aff fades and gains should be ok but curves are lost so I don’t bother with those.
Before exporting look at the pool in Nuendo and make sure all files are converted to 48/24 waves. (for sound design I like to import other sample rate to be read slower.. have to manually bounce those :p)
Also, all 5.1 files in nuendo have to be exported mono + 2 stereo because PT mixers don’t like interleaved surround for some reason. Same with scene organisation they like to double the tracks for next scene to be able to see it better and grab the regions (I guess?).. again a need I don’t have using proper colors and markers myself in Nuendo.
And then comes the AFF adventure. select just a portion of the film test and ex/import in PT see if anything goes wrong.. do it again until all is fine.
I charge 2 days of work for that. You would say an AFF should take few hours really but by the time you organise the tracks for PT habits, test export, do corrections, finalise the PT session with names folders and routing.. yeah 2 days is more realistic on a 1h film also I like clean ready sessions well organised so I don’t like to rush it.
The good thing is I can have PT and Nuendo at the same time on my PC wich helps
I am in somewhat a similar boat, but the other way around. We are a post house in germany with 5 Nuendo Studios, including a theatrical mix stage up to 7.1.
I actually just now have a request to mix a feature which is prepared in PT. We tested a lot with AATranslator2 and some things work fine, some don’t. Ultimately, we bit the bullet and made the mix stage somewhat PT ready and are going to mix in PT. There is just too much time wasted in all these little detailed problems you can run into.
We are mixing on a Nuage, so we are propably the only ones to just try out the PT Bridge for Nuage on a Mac.
I would love to mix that one in Nuendo…
On the otherhand, having a Mixstage ready for Nuendo, but PT also works ok, is propably a good thing cosidering the jobs it can create…
oh and by the way… DM me when you are looking for a mix stage next time in germany. Not as big as yellow cabs, but able to mix for theatrical. Happy to show you our room.
Yes I guess a pro studio with Nuendo has to have a copy of PT working too ! It’s such a pressure with productions that I don’t see ways around it. I mean, productions I talk to don’t even know the name Nuendo and ask it twice with a suspiscious look.
AATranslator or AFF need the same amount of work in the end. I mean if the session you want to convert is not cautiously made with that convertion stage in mind it will not work. There’s just to many little things coming up. Multiply it by hundreds of tracks and thousands of audio files over 70min of film.. instant nightmare.
We have been using Nuendo since 2004-ish. We were on Fairlight before that. However it quickly became apparent that as a commercial facility, we couldn’t ask clients to transfer their ProTools sessions over to Nuendo when they were mixing at Yellow Cab Studios. Too complicated, unreliable, and too much info lost in translation.
So early on we bought a set of used ProTools HD cards, and then HDX. Now all our Studios are both Nuendo and PT. If I were mixing all the projects at our place, and the sound edit was done only on Nuendo, it wouldn’t be an issue. But our business is also renting out the rooms to production companies with their own PT-centric crews. This means that we not only need to own and operate PT, buy need to be good at it too.
In any case, we’re always open to meet new Nuendo users who would want to come and mix their projects at our place.
