Give us the old offline process back

Nuendo
,
#1

Hi,

I think that DOP (Direct Offline Process) in Cubendo is conceptually flawed and I have been holding off from from upgrading from N7 for this particular reason.

For me offline process includes operations that can only be done offline (ie not as a plugin in the channelstrip). This includes all kinds of manual editing of pitch, timing and noise removal. Izoptope RX and Autotune Graphical mode beeing two of those.

DOP allows you to change processes earlier in the chain and then the later processer recalculate. But what if you change timing in melodyne/variaudio and then try to remove a mouth noise with rx at a specific word. I can’t see how this ever will fully work.

DOP like it is, makes sense for a lot of things. But implementing it broke a really valuable tool that I and many more used a lot.

ARA2 is a work-around that helps some of the time but doesn’t let me select a range of audio (with the range tool) and just process that. ARA doesn’t allow me to go back and forth between spectral repare and variaudio. And ARA doesn’t like me to do DOP stuff over it any way.

I don’t clean all my tracks from start to finish with RX first and go through them and tune everything and then start mixing. I fix stuff that need fixing when it becomes necessary and the old offline process allowed me to to that.

So, bring back the old offline process. Put it “first in the chain” before all the DOP stuff. It can still have undo of the “remove processing” type. Because I can’t see how DOP ever will be able to fully work with all the manual stuff anyway.

Best regards,
Johannes

#2

Hear hear!

#3

I’ve only had half a cup of coffee yet… I don’t understand what you’re saying.

Can you give step-by-step examples of how it did work and how it works now, along with why there’s a problem?

#4

+1 from me, 100% agree. Bring back the original old Offline Process as an option.

Quite a few people have posted complaining that DOP either bugs out (in one of my projects it broke and wouldn’t let me pitch shift anything from that point forward) or breaks their workflow. I’m also stuck on N7 until either it’s fixed and is rock solid or until we can disable DOP or use the old way of Offline Processing.

Edit: here’s my old post about the pitch-shift issue with 0 replies…

#5

Sorry for the long rant (again)

So in the olden days of the offline process the program (Cubase or Nuendo 4 and older I believe) did not need to keep track of exactly what changes you did to the file. The the processes you did, to clips or ranges within clips became part of the audio file. And when you applied more processing it was always on top of the previous edits. Even if more functionality got introduced later, offline process still worked pretty well up to N7.

With DOP the application “promises” to keep track of your DOPs to the extent that you can freely change order or remove all of your offline processes and automatically recalculate the end result.

Here is a example when this attempt is futile:

  1. Range select one phrase in a vocal track with a offline process. Change the timings of the words with with melodyne or similar where you manually do the edit.
  2. Range select a couple of words within the same phrase and use Izotope RX to remove a mouth click and soften a “sss”. Also as a completely manual process.
  3. Go back and change the timings from the first phrase again. How is the application suppose to handle the RX-process, what to do and exactly where?

Obviously you can permanently apply the offline processes as you go or only introduce edits on top and everything will work, but what would be the point then?
But even worse, now Nuendo tries to keep everything afloat and not “permanently” applying edits. This has caused the interface to “true and manual”* offline plugins/processors to have stopped working with DOP somehow. I don’t know why it doesn’t really work now, just that me and many more are ending up with a much less straight forward work flow.

My solution would be to introduce a “First slot” in the DOP. This “First slot” would work like the old offline process. You apply your plugins and they become part of whats fed along the chain. If you want a undo function, it can be realised by peeling off the processes one at a time. Main reasons are:

  1. Why break something that (used to) works?
  2. The super flexible DOP will never be able to handle all the manual dependent edits anyway.
  3. This solution would give us the best of both worlds. (in my humble mind)

*) Some processes are offline only by default. A simple example is to reverse a audio file or time stretch it. Basically anything that doesn’t naturally work in the insert slots.

Best regards,
Johannes

#6

I’m not in front of Nuendo right now so I can’t check it. But I still don’t understand the problem. You ask a rhetorical question and that assumes that I ‘get’ what the problem is. I don’t. You have to spell it out for me.

To me it’s obvious that DOP would apply to whatever is on the timeline. But if you’ve processed something on the timeline and then start editing it then yeah, there’s a decision to be made for how the software should handle it. My assumption would be that whatever I did would stay the same. So if I declicked something in RX that would be a part of the event, and as I move or edit the event that part will stay declicked.

Is that not how it works?

#7

DOP keeps score of all edits that are done and in what order. So if you remove or change the first edit in the chain Nuendo can go back to that stage and change/remove that and then re-apply the later steps. (The later stages are not kept as much as recalculated)

But some offline process requires manual input to get to the right result, like manual pitch correction. And if the phrase edited had its timing manipulated in a previous process they are co dependant. If you remove the first step the second step will never really know how to automaticly recalculate without errors.

This is only the first part of the problem though. In order to have this automatic DOP functionality, plugins need to behave in a certain way. IE they need to work like a on-line process, Nuendo recalls the settings and then processes the audio. But for processes that cant work with just a ”preset” like autotune graphic mode and rx, audio need to be sent to those plugins and after the work is done there audio is returned to Nuendo. But Nuendo doesn’t keep track of exactly what is done in the process and therefore can not recreate the step later. I’ll admit that i don’t know what is going on under the hood here but i know that one after the other my offline process plugins have stopped working with the growing complexity of the DOP functionality.

Is that more clear?

#8

Klart som korvspad!

(Clear as the juice you get left after having boiled sausages… don’t ask…)

So if I understand correctly the manual pitch correction relies on your choices on an audio file, and once you go back and change something before that process it won’t correctly update because the process wasn’t automatic in the same way an RX denoise preset is, or the way a static EQ is… correct?

I guess I would think that if the second, manual process is carried out within Nuendo it should be able to follow at what points in the file the process is executed and in which way. So in other words if you manually tune the lyrics “Du gamla du fria” and then go back and cut out “gamla” it should still understand what to do with the other three words. If that’s not the case then I certainly support that feature.

What I don’t quite get though is if this worked before and now no longer does. I would have thought it’d have been the same in the past.

And as for third party plugins I’m guessing we’re still just stuck there. I suppose if ARA2 supports more data transfer those sorts of additions might work, but any operation in RX’ standalone by definition can’t be redone in Nuendo since Nuendo knows nothing about what happened in RX. So that just seems natural to me and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the new DOP versus the old offline processing.

Am I understanding things correctly?

#9

Yes.

But if you move stuff around, time stretch and such, Nuendo needs a pretty advanced AI i to keep track of where to tune and not. So while I don’t mind Steinberg trying to perfect DOP, let us have a fully functioning “old school” offline process available in the mean time.

The reason it kind of worked in N7 and older was that the offline process functionality was slightly dumber and more forgiving. The new function wants to keep doors open for opening up and editing already executed processes. That’s why I assume things broke.

Yes. But I’m also sure that I don’t fully understand the inner workings of all code in the app :wink:

To further boil down my reasoning, let’s say that there are two different meanings off “offline process” here.

  1. DOP offline processes plugins. It works best with plugins that work in linear time (online).
  2. Some processes are offline by nature. Time compression can’t be processed linearly. Manual editing of audio is offline. Some processes of this type got harder to access with DOP. (RX and autotune being among those)

I know this is a simplification, but it represents my experience as Nuendo user. I’ve been using Nuendo professionally since N1.6

Best regards,
Johannes