I could swear that I did this once a couple of years ago, but now I can’t find a way to do it, unless the feature was removed from Cubase, which I doubt.
I was probably using Cubase Pro 13, or maybe Nuendo 13 back in 2024 on my Mac Studio with a pitiful 64 GB of RAM, and this project had over 200 instrument tracks, so obviously the machine was choking badly.
I remember that I exported a mixdown, choosing the option to create a new project after export, and it created a new project that consisted of all the same tracks, except that each VSTi track was rendered as audio, but it preserved the FX for each track, and the group channels. Basically it was the same project, but much easier to work with because there were no VSTis sucking up insane amounts of RAM.
Well, somehow now I can’t find a way to do that. I tried using each of the four options under effects, and all it does is render each track that I selected in the multiple list. But no FXs or Sends are transferred to the new project.
Is this not possible? I’m sure I did that for that project two years ago. I certainly didn’t recreate all the FXs and Sends of that project into the rendered one.
Maybe this here can help you:
You need to select the tracks to be rendered yourself first.
Yes Johnny, that’s something I did recently, but what I remember is what I mentioned, not the render tracks thing, but a whole new project that renders just the tracks you select, in my case VSTis, and also the groups and FX without rendering them.
Meaning, the new project had all the same tracks, with all the inserts, strips, sends, group channels, FX channels, etc, with the difference that the VSTi tracks were rendered.
But it wasn’t the render tracks function you mentioned, it was a whole new project. Could it be a feature that only Nuendo has?
I wouldn’t know about that. Hopefully someone else has some insights.
With these settings, any tracks I render will be rendered and inserted into a new project (untitled.cpr) which then becomes the active project. (Cubase 14)
Yes, but that new project only has several audio tracks, all rendered, no inserts, strip changes or sends, etc. It’s a barebones project that has several audio tracks with the rendered audio and even FX and group channels, but nothing else.
I just loaded the project in Nuendo 15, it doesn’t seem to have any additional options when it comes to that, just the few additional things like Normalize, but nothing that tells me why I was able to create that project carrying over all the inserts and else.
Ah - I should have read your first post properly.
For the case you describe, Johnny’s solution is by far the best solution. Export Audio Mixdown is NOT the way to do this.
All you do is de-select any events in the event display, select the VSTi tracks you want to convert, then select Render In Place>Render settings. Choose ‘As Separate Events’ or ‘As One Event’. For the Processing choose Dry. You can choose to Remove or Disable the source tracks. Note that any Inserts or Sends will be automatically copied over to the new tracks. Press Render. When complete, save the project under a different name. Done!
