First Impressions Nuendo 13 (actually using it)

Nuendo
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I figured we could use a separate thread for first impressions of using Nuendo 13 to separate that from what it is/could have/should have been in people’s mind…

Here’s my first contribution on that note:

  1. I love the channel window in the editor. That allows you to do a lot of things during edit without having to keep switching to the mixer window or splitting your screen.

  2. The vocal chain plugin looks nice. Will take some mileage to find out the details, but it does help to have all of this in on one screen.

  3. The Voice Separator at first glance is good, but is coming up short in my first test. Applied it to a recent project, and when enabled it butchers the first syllable of the DX, kind of like a warm-up or learning delay. Syllable is nice and clear when bypassed. Haven’t tried it with DOP, this was a insert.

  4. The flat design takes some getting used to, but not as bad as I expected after all the forum discussion. One good thing in the mixer is that you can get slimmer channel strips, meaning you can get more of them on the screen. When I max everything out, I can get 107 tracks on to my wide-screen monitor.

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I had a LOT of troubles just getting it to even start without hanging on VST3 scanning. Somehow I finally got past that after nuking all the settings it carried over.

  1. Unlike you, I don’t like the channel editor at all. I will give it time and see though.
  2. The gui is pretty awful IMO. I hate the look of the faders now. It’s also much more difficult to know what track I’m on now. The slightly lighter gray on the selected channel is too faint of a difference in a 100 track project. I will also give it time and maybe they will improve on it. - note: found a setting to turn up the brightness on the selected channel. That’s ok now

Some (if not all) of my project logical editors don’t work anymore. Such as: color all FX tracks a specific color. - nevermind on this. I didn’t have the correct color pallet selected.

I think I may just stick with working in N12, though I bought N13. The gui changes seem to be a step backwards. I will see what can be customized. Hopefully an update might fix some things.

Been messing with it more. I’m starting to get it looking a bit better, though the faders still bug me. But in the grand scheme, that’s a minor point. I have a large session tomorrow. I will give it a few hours before the session and if it’s OK, I will try it in the actual session.

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There will be at least a few changes. This has been officially confirmed.

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This can be customized in the preferences to be dark gray or even white. However, with white the text doesn’t invert, which seems to be a bug or the devs missed it. I do use my channels fully colored though.

The white text needs to have customization options and the mute/solo colors need to be toned down.

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Tried it for couple of hours, expirienced some graphical glitches when control room changed to gabrage for couple of seconds.
But the biggest problem for me is, instant crash or cascading errors when using dxRevive plugin in direct offline processing and reopening dop winow again.
Tested it on 2 different machines with different win versions. Problem persists.
Had to go back to N12
Otherwise looks good to me.

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I’ve been having some issues with the events shifting position when using Goyo. dxRevive seems to work fine here on macOS. Haven’t picked up Supertone Clear yet.

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Suggestions: :grinning: SB should start releasing free BETA for few months then release an Ironed out Potential Release candidate

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I’ve had more crashes than clean starts so far with Nuendo 13. I was able to work on a project last night. Tried to open the same project this morning and “poof”… Nuendo disappeared. I went to look for a crash log but I can’t find any. Either the dmp files are in a different location, or every one of the dozens of crashes I’ve had were not logged.

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I believe Sonarworks SoundID is the cause of some of the “poof” crashes. They suggest rolling back to a previous version.

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Could you send me the corresponding DMP/IPS per PM? Thank you

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The DOP crashes and processing issues with dxRevive, Goyo and others shall be fixed with the 13.0.20 update. Please let me know, if someone still has those issues.
Cheers
Dirk

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■ I’m not a fan of the GUI change. It doesn’t change the effectiveness of the tools, but I have to look at the screen off and on for about 8hrs everyday so I’d prefer for my $1,000 DAW to not look like some cheap Logic knockoff.
Please bring back the 3-dimensional look, Steinberg. It bugs me. The GUI may not directly effect ny work, but my comfort does and it’s discomforting to look at after 20yrs using Nuendo. This is Nuendo’s first discomforting GUI.

■ I love the new channel panel on the editor window. Nuendo offers plenty that PT-HDX and Logic dont, and that was pretty much the only thing they had that Nuendo didn’t. Im happy to see Nuendo leaving no wins for the competition lol.

As for how useful the panel actually is, Im still getting used to it. I like not having to open and close a window to access inserts and the fact that it switches channels as I select them on the physical console will likely save me time as I grow more used to having that option.
I haven’t had enough downtime to experiment yet and see if it’ll allow me to change views, like the main mixer does, but I hope so because I have very little need for virtual faders. Setting it up to give me quick access to inserts/sends would be much for useful. So, if that’s not an option I’ll find tomorrow at work, it would be a very useful update.

■ The vocal chain plugin ain’t for me. To be fair, I haven’t had an audio for film/video project since updating the systems from 12 to 13. So my experience was on a singing vocal channel and I was never gonna love it for music. I may feel differently once I try it on dialog.

■ Have only spent a minute or so with the tone matching and some of the other new features, so I’ll have to comment on those later.

■ The new emulation plug-ins are decent enough to use in music. They obviously dont compare to the original hardware versions or high-end knockoffs, but they compare well against Waves/UAD2 emulation plugins.

■ BUG:
I randomly get this big white-out box over the screen and it happens fairly often. The glitch slows down my workflow, so hopefully that’s fixed in an update.

■ I like that all of my settings and project templates transfered to 13 without issue. I begin client sessions/projects with templates I made so that my custom channel colors, routing, renderers, etc. are how I want them and my templates have disappeared after updating a couple times before. I was glad I didn’t have to make new templates for blank projects, Atmos with native renderer, Atmos with RMU, stereo film, stereo music, tracking, etc.

■ When it comes to Atmos, Nuendo was already killing every other DAW and the lead got a little bigger this time. Sorry, this is getting long so I’ll leave it at that.

☆ All in all, a worthwhile upgrade, but PLEASE fix the GUI.

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My take on it after about 4 projects on it;

~ GUI: overall I actually think things seem more clear on my computers. Mixer and project window on a 3440x1400 ultrawide, and video and meters on a 1920x1200 monitor. The one thing I don’t like is the white font plus some of the buttons, Mute/Solo, Read/Write, on the project page because they are so saturated (though not in the Channel view to the left). But overall I’m into it I think.

~ The Channel view is actually useful. Not sure if it was better than just improving Inspector, but either way I’m glad it’s here. More usable to me.

~ Plugins… VocalChain is a bit sluggish to operate on my computer compared to for example Frequency. I also don’t really like that the various tools in it are limited. I get why that is, but I often need more than 4 bands of fully parametric EQ to correct dialog and this plugin doesn’t really cut it. I also find that the compressors in it aren’t really what I’m looking for. Again with too few controls (maybe I’m missing something). I do like that I can have more processes in one plugin for faking phones and speakers etc. though. // VoxComp is again the same, having maybe too few controls to be useful. // EQs are ok. I might use them at some point.

~ Upgrade was smooth. No problems. Only had to update a couple of key commands and relink things like my trackball and Eucontrol and so on.

~ H.264 video decoding on the GPU. I see it. And maybe that’s why
~ v13 seems a bit more ‘snappy’ and ‘responsive’.

~ TonalMatch worked well the first time I used it, and I think it may actually be great to use. Especially for projects where we have to move a bit faster.

~ VoiceSeparation was ok. I think with these types of DeNoisers the content really matters. Sometimes they do wonders and sometimes they don’t work well without too many artifacts. Still need to spend more time on it, but so far I like the fact that we have it available as another tool.

~ Switching from mono to stereo track. Already got some use for it. Thumbs up.

There’s more that I’ll likely run into sooner rather than later but the above is what struck me as noteworthy so far.

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I hadn’t noticed that they now allow switching a stereo track to mono/mono to stereo. I was on the phone walking a client through an export in his home studio over the phone awhile back. He was using Reaper and mentioned switching his channel between mono and stereo and I was stunned because its so rare that another DAW has a feature I don’t have in our Steinberg system [Nuendo + WL Pro + SL Pro + VST Connect Pro + some plugin upgrades].
I’ll definitely be checking that out when I get back to work. Forgetting to select the size channel when creating a group-bus/track/FX-bus is probably the most common error I make. To make matters worse, I’ve been doing this so long that I know what compression sounds like, what frequency and Q Im hearing that needs a cut/boost, what settings will give me the reverb/delay Im hearing in my mind, etc. So I’ll often jump straight into processing a bus before I press play again and suddenly realize I summed stereo channels to a mono bus, mono/stereo for 5.1 reverb, summed a stereo kick to a stereo bus instead of mono to process with mono analog tools, etc. Being able to switch the track would be a big plus. Im excited to check that out.

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Unfortunately as of the newest update I’m having the opposite. Whenever I drag an audio event left or right, it’s very sluggish/choppy for the first second or two, and then it will all the sudden get smooth. I have a really powerful computer so I don’t know what’s going on. This issue doesn’t exist in N12. Not sure if I should try a reinstall or what.

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Just notice another positive thing today: my Supervision Loudness module now has meters that move smoothly. Previously the movement was a bit ‘jumpy’ and I therefore stuck with iZotope Insight for that reason. Now with v13 they move fine it seems.

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