( 1 ) With all the various control devises out today I find that things can sometimes get reset or moved for whatever reason. You’re turning knobs on one thing and adjusting another. Before you know what you did, 30 seconds has gone by and you mucked up a part of your mix.
In the days of the desk we could see every fader. Today we have multiple devices in front of us, shared work stations, and custom key commands… This is trouble waiting, to me.
As an example; a certain keyboard controller has been driving me crazy. Every time I re-enter a project it takes control of my faders. I have since disabled it, but still…
Depending on how many tracks you have it could take you some time to figure exactly what you moved by accident. So I was thinking that a FADER LOCK button would be helpful. It could be global on the active (in view) mixer only, or on each channel.
Anyway these are my thoughts on what I think would come in handy
Activating Read Automation would work if data was written but I don’t need automaton for every single track . Also, a fader Lock would also not affect any automation written. But that’s obvious.
No.
It switches the tracks with no data written to the value last set.
And you can switch it on for the tracks you want… only
it will… since the volume automation is represented through fader movement… the volume parameter is the fader level…
a fader lock would do the opposite than the fader automation
That’ll be a problem though if the parameter is moved by accident. In other words if auto is set to “read” but there are no values written and the fader is moved it’ll remained in the new position. There is no value to be read so it isn’t a solution to the problem unless data has been written somewhere on the track.
If you’re in post it’s generally beneficial to have data written, and if you’re using VCAs it’s pretty much a must. So while it isn’t what you’re asking for I think the solution is to create starting parameters for each track in your template and then leave tracks in “read” if you want to make them “safe”.
This was the hope in the implementation of the feature. That automation would supersede fader lock, and continue to work. But I know nothing about programming and it could be a major challenge to ad.
Beack in the Pre DAW era (some 1.3 million years ago), we had a separate computer for our Martinsound Flying faders.
When starting any new mix, we would WRITE the initial (faders at zero) automation, along with the MUTE status of each channel, before beginning any mix, from about 5 seconds before the mix, to about 5 seconds after the mix.
This meant we would put the automation into write mode, and touch each fader so it would initiate write mode, and then stop, and write it until the end of the song length.
We would then proceed to mix, knowing we had a “safety” set of automation values, so unwanted people could not change the initial fader values nor mutes.
The same goes for any DAW these days… Just write an initial value before your song begins, and tell Nuendo to “write to end”. This locks in the initial value, and as long as you put the channel into READ mode, no one can mess with that.
I agree a “fader lock” button could be useful, but it could also be a PITA. Imagine trying to write automation and forgetting you locked that channel!
As mentioned, this assumes that this feature would be set with rules, where engaging the READ button would override the fader lock. otherwise it would be more of a hindrance than a benefit.
You could also implement a key command like ctrl while grabbing the fader to unlock it, for example. Clearly it would need to be worked in to fit with the current set up.