How is Nuendo working for you in 2014

Nuendo
1

We at the Protools camp are having to make substatial financial decisions about our continuation with protools. I have always been tinkering on investing into Nuendo. I enjoyed the demo. I would much prefer it if the post community made a majority shift over to Nuendo. I’d drop AVID in a flash. If Protools was owned by a nicer company, however, that would be a different story.

Now is obviously the best time for Nuendo to look good to the post community. How is Nuendo working for you? This forum seems a tad quieter than ours. Is it because you are all happy at work?

Does Yamaha/Steinberg show any signs of squeezing its users like AVID are and going for an expensive subscription model? What are your predictions?

Much appreciated
Ben Chase

2

I highly recommend buying an eLicenser USB dongle for about $25 and then try the app out. You get like 400 hours which is plenty.

The app has some very very very good functionality that PT lacks. On the other hand there are some things STILL missing, such as VCAs and grouping tracks that’s worth the name.

Biggest difficulty moving over will probably be

  • lack of some features
  • different nomenclature
  • a very configurable app which makes it a bit time consuming to figure out (i.e. unlike PT it won’t look the same from one user to the next but can be more different in my experience)

I’d love to talk about Steinberg the company, but then I’ll just be accused of “playing politics”. Don’t worry, I don’t understand what that means either. Can’t say I’m entirely thrilled with either Avid or Steinberg. In a nutshell Steiny drags their feet on some of the basics, but on the other hand is way more innovative than Avid. As for cost who knows what Steinberg / Yamaha has planned. I sincerely hope that they won’t create an either/or situation like Avid appears to be doing. I’m fine with adding a subscription model and a support plan, but not the way Avid does it.

3

Thanks for your reply Lydiot.
Talking about Steinberg the company is exactly what we want to read about. Let the politics begin.

The fact is that investing into a DAW for a studio/post facility IS all about the company behind the DAW and if they are likely to leave you high and dry like AVID will be.

And we arent talking about technical support, that is a falicy IMO, a white elephant that is currently being touted by AVID. Most post houses are very knowledgable about their rigs and dont need lame support. Forums are much more helpful.

What we want to know is Yamaha going to do the same thing? eg. If they are going to subscription (whch really sucks) if you let it lapse will you have to re-buy it. They dont tie it to hardware currently, but do they plan to? Is Nuage going to be locked down? Do they plan to lock Nuage to Nuendo?

It is only specualtion ATM I know but damm we have to scrounge around these days to get an inkling on how we are going to be screwed over by software developers in the future when it IS a big investment.

Yamaha is obviously a public company and thus driven by law to constantly go the path of making a profit. Does this filter down to Steinberg? You see that law was supposed to have checks in place to eep incentive to make it attractable to the USER base but a current CEO needs to have profit showing on their watch thus it can be flaunted. AVID is definately screwing its userbase because they apparently have a monopoly. This needs to change, and I just hope that other developers dont follow suite so we have nowhere to go.

4

I’m really happy. I do music productions (albums, composing, etc) as well as final mix for movies and TV series.

VCA faders will be added soon, I’m told. A couple of things could be changed in the mixer in terms of workflow. I have had good support from Timo and the team at Steinberg. So far, so good.

I dumped PT a while back and haven’t missed it.

5

I came from Fairlight many years ago, had worked with PT as well. I decided to go for Nuendo and have since installed and maintained systems for various colleagues and customers as well.

  1. Nuendo gets the job done. It works really well. That’s the most important thing.
  2. It’s super stable and reliable on my machines, I work with customers watching. It does not crash unexpectedly.
  3. Most of the things on PT idea scale have been in Nuendo for years.
  4. The necessary updates keep coming in on a regular basis. (AAF, video engine, etc.)
  5. You buy and update whenever you want. No crazy subscription model.

:smiley: I am really very happy with the platform. :smiley:

There are of course things that I would want differently (clip based EQ, revised edit mode), but that goes for everything in life, doesn’t it?

Ollie

6

Great to hear! So what version are you guys using? I read some post houses are still on 5.5 because they dont like 6 workflow, not a choice due to stability or avoiding the cutting edge.

Is 6.x really that bad?

Is anyone familar with the Protools “field recorder guide track” workflow and the ability to conform tracks to the edit of the guide. Very handy for not only edits done with the guide and replacing with online media but also in re-conforming edits to an edit done by the video editor. Is there a Nuendo equivalent?

BTW I did run the demo earlier this year and had a few hours on it but then a project came up and I had to get to work and lost my demo period. It’d be great if you could pause the demo expiration clock on elicensor in these situations.

I see Ediload and Maisch conformer as a solution at $1200 but if Steinberg bought a comprehensive conforming feature into Nuendo it would really turn some heads. It amazes me that any DAW developer would think it doesnt happen in the majority of projects. I think reconforming to timeline changes would happen in most projects.

7

V6.5 is essential because AAF has seen some substantial improvements lately.It’s an amazing release.
AFAIK Steinberg is planning a reconfirming tool for Nuendo. The rumors have been on the forum for a while and in Nuendo land these rumors generally turn out to be true (ADR tool)

Have you tried 6.5 or 6?
Since 6.5 was a paid upgrade, it might have a new demo period.
Also, why don’t you PM Timo Wildenhain. I’m sure he can sort something out for you.

Ollie

8

Version 6 included a major redesign of the GUI. For some the negatives were too strong. For us that aren’t 18 years old any longer some cursor use is very frustrating because one has to find a very small zone to trigger the desired event. For example: Nuendo has a “combined panner” which is a panner that consists of a “bar” that covers the entire range from left to right. If you want to narrow the stereo image you simply make that bar narrower. You can also move the right side over towards the center to shift the image. But when I try to grab that side of the bar a button shows up and I accidentally click the button instead. I believe it’s the same for inserts. Buttons are hidden until you hoover above them. I find it 100% annoying.

Another thing is that they promoted customizable keycommands - and rightly so since it’s a fantastic feature - but then after the redesign essentially “disconnected” the mixer window(s) from the rest, so that assigning a command may work in the edit/project window but no longer in the mixer. For example: For an inexplicable reason there are no buttons to select automation mode per track in the mixer (!), and there is no way to trigger automation match when riding in latch mode. So what I did was create a macro key command that toggles automation latch. This way I can set automation to latch mode, start riding the fader, and when I want to match previous automation I hit my key command which turns automation write off which triggers “match” and then automation write on. But this only works in the edit/project window, and not in the mixer!!!

Sometimes I just get the feeling that the people making these decisions aren’t actually working on the stuff or talking to users that work on the stuff full time and therefore don’t really understand the implications of their decisions.

I’m on 6.0.x right now and won’t be upgrading until I see enough of value in the newest version. You wanted to talk about the company well here’s the worst part of it: They’ll sell you on Nuendo being a post-production application and then leave version 6.0.x in the water when it comes to .aaf/.omf support. Of course when you see the advertising it’ll just say it supports .aafs not that it does so less than optimally. So now I’m stuck with having to pay more to get the fixes they just applied to version 6.5.x. See what I’m saying here?

If you’re not making a living using any of their apps then who cares? Then you can salivate over new features and just spend the money you make elsewhere on your hobby. But if this is how you intend to make a living it can be an issue. And the issue is NOT - since we’re now talking about Steinberg the company - that they leave out the odd lacking or poorly functioning feature of what they sold you, but that it’s such an essential feature. You can’t call Nuendo a post-production app for media, say that includes .aaf support, and then have users pay again to get it to work up to par with the competition. In my opinion at least. And there’s been a couple of cases of this if I recall correctly.

Just to be clear though: There are a decent amount of non-post users of Nuendo that don’t see these issues because their delivery requirements and import/export requirements aren’t as ‘strict’ as the ones we see.

Stability: Top Notch. Seriously. I’m on win7 x64, a computer that I assembled myself like 3-4 years ago, and I never have crashes. I do notice a slow down on larger projects but that’s to be expected with ‘such an old’ computer. I have far more problems with PT on a MAC when I go out to work in studios (!).

It is paused, at least the way I recall it. It’s 400 usable hours, not 400 hours from the start of the demo. I could be wrong though. I’m sure if you check with Steinberg they can reset it.

9

bcslaam,

Let’s start by agreeing that No perfect software developer exists. Every business model will upset some people, and software is always going to have some bugs. It sometimes comes out to who is the lesser of evils.

We have a (formerly Euphonix) AVID system-5 console. Since AVID bought Euphonix, the customer service went from friendly to frustrating. Yes they will repair your console, but you can no longer call your “person” and say “hey here’s what’s happening, let get it fixed”. I miss the personal contact with someone you know has the answer.

I have always had supremely stable systems using Nuendo. We can never know what a company has planned for the future, but from my experience, Steinberg’s model is (and has been) a few updates per Nuendo/Cubase version over the course of a couple of years. then a new version release comes out. you can either upgrade for a small price, or choose not to upgrade. there is no penalty for not upgrading. However… If you choose to not upgrade (for example) from N5 to N6, and then N7 comes out your upgrade price will be higher (since you skipped a cycle). It is still much lower than having to repurchase the program. This is ok when skipping just 1 cycle, but we skipped 3 cycles. At first it looked like we would have to buy N6 at full purchase price, because there was no upgrade path listed at the Steinberg store. As it turns out there was an upgrade price it just was not listed on the website. We didn’t upgrade because for what we do the new features were not of GREAT use to us. This changed when…

1 of our PC’s blew the mother board. We were using Nuendo-3 on Windows-XP at the time. Since WIN-XP was no longer supported, we went with Win-7, which meant upgrading to N6. Because of this I now feel that a few hundred dollars every 2-3 years to upgrade is less painful than paying a larger price because you skipped a few development cycles. Because of the larger expense, I still have 1 system on N3 and the other on N6. This creates a whole new set of issues, as I have to migrate work between the 2 systems all the time.

We used to use Sonic Solutions, we had $80k invested in 3 systems. five years into these systems we got a letter from them saying our systems were too old and could no longer be supported. REALLY, 5 years???
This is why we went to a host based system like Nuendo. WE did not want to be tied to proprietary hardware that would cause us to HAVE to upgrade constantly. And it has worked great for us. We have lost 3 computers due to system failures since we first bought N3, and all we had to do was fix the PC or build a new one. We didn’t loose Nuendo, just reinstall Nuendo plugin your dongle and get back to work. With Sonic we had to mail out the board for repair and wait until it came back to get on with our work.

And remember you are not tied to just 1 manufacturers hardware. Buy whatever convertors you want. etc. etc…

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

Later,
Brain

10

I use Nuendo 6 professionally (Post and Music) and I love it.
The demo is not timeframe limited. I use it and it last 400 HOURS of USE.

Nuendo has indeed, as Lydiot and others said, gone through a big GUI and Paradigm change. Everything that was always visible in a glance is now hidden in a clickable design… Panels go up and down, hiding unless you click a modifier key…
Then, as with every cup, some people see it empty while others…
Hopefully Nuendo 7 will harmonize the design and will make everybody happy again (dream mode on).

If you want to talk politics, Steinberg is certainly not the dragon AVID seems to be. Innovation is and has always been the heart of founder Charlie Steinberg and his crew (Asio, VSTi…). You get now in ProTools what we grew up with in Steinberg’s land (Track freeze, offline rendering…). They’ll end up with a similar feature set one day…

I have Protools (I’ll get the plan ONCE to cheaply upgrade my current version to the latest) but I really find Avid is acting a bit silly these years.
Avid has screwed up a large user base of Procontrol and Control 24 owners, then they changed their price policy from near free (with hardware) to much more expensive software updates. Now to upset pretty much everybody with a yearly “support plan”…
At least Steinberg tries not to kill support for their own babies (Houston for instance is still supported with feature added in Nuendo 6.5) when they can (ok, I have the surround plugin pack…). The midi interface Midex was even given a 64 bit beta (as is) version developed as a side project by some dev…

Now in this forum, what you see as a quiet gentle forum is just the ashes of what we had a few years ago. This forum went through many different incarnations ; open to everybody V1, then V2 board, then registered users only…
It went from the Number one place to hang around for resources, technical help, fight chat (Jake68, Lex years…), Bs & entertaining talk (EvilChild…), extremely well informed hardware guys (The Tafkat, Scott… years) to near desert land.
Maybe negativism is the reason, but I doubt it is the lonely reason. Maybe we grew up, the web isn’t so new anymore and we get more job and less time to chat ?..

Anyway, welcome on board if you jump.
La vie est belle.
Bifop

11

Also re Nuage

I seem to recall that it communicates in HUI as well as Eucon, so you can get some limited control of other DAW products.

12

Nuage does NOT integrate the Eucon protocol because it is, since AVID acquisition of Euphonix, tied to Avid/Euphonix hardware units.

13

Once you have the Combined Panner enabled, just click-drag the horizontal bar in the center, up or down - has worked like that in Cubase for ever (since SX days at least…!). Dragging up narrows the field, down widens it. You can move the whole field too, with a click-drag action left/right. Try it…! May be the same for Nuendo…

14

I know how it works, I’m saying that the GUI makes it harder than it needs to be to find an area to grab to get the intended effect.

15

We have 10 Nuendo systems running along with 4 PT HDs.
So speaking for post, Nuendo definitely does the job and I enjoy working with it.
FOr me it’s a great tool for editing AND mixing and development is on a steady path.

From v5.5 to 6.5 we got:

  • A brilliant ADR solution
  • Integrated R128 Metering
  • A very reliable AAF component
  • Nuage

just to name a few, and I expect more to come from v7.

16

I politely disagree. The new Combined Panner as I use it in 6.5 is brilliant, especially in the Mixer. I would challenge anyone using a different panning mechanism to a race to get the stereo field left/right/wide/narrow/reversed, to taste, faster. Don’t think it’s possible. And in the much maligned Mixer, the target to click is huge.

It’s very much like the Location Bar at the top of the Project window. Once you get it, it’s fantastic.

To the OP: I think some of the newer features (new Mixer GUI in particular) have been offputting to some long time users. I am a user since 2.0 myself (2002), but apparently enjoy change more than most. Paradigms have been changed in some cases and there certainly are some debatable decisions. But overall, I consider 6.5 a clear improvement over 5.5 on many levels. I am willing to change my approach to tasks to maximize results when given new tools. Actually, I rather enjoy it. Keeps my mind fresh.

Overall, I feel that 6.5 is a worthwhile move forward and that once acclimated, I can move faster than ever. Which summarizes my take of Steinberg. Consistent improvement in Nuendo for a reasonable amount of money. Actually, for peanuts when considering the big picture. For a new user, those previous paradigms would not be an issue, and I think 6.5 is a good place to start with the app. Better than starting with 5.5 and sooner than later have to absorb the changes.

I too have PT and use it sparingly from time to time for various reasons. Certainly, back in the day, a really solid hardware based PT rig was simply more powerful and stable than any Native system being pushed to the edge. These days, however, it seems that the scenario has flipped, and a seriously powerful and well built PC running Nuendo likely defines stability currently.

I just bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Thought about the iPhone 6 Plus, which friends have as well. In the end, either is so ridiculously capable, as compared to 18 months ago that there is actually less difference between the Note 4 and the 6 Plus than there is between the 6 Plus and the 5S.

The same with current PT and Nuendo. In many ways, they are closer in feature set to each other than they are to a version of themselves from 3 years ago. For me, the customization built into Nuendo is the decisive element. But you have to be willing and able to put in the work to fully comprehend what Nuendo is uniquely capable of to reap the full benefit.

I’ve read the manual through 3 times. Worth every minute invested. My system is highly customized and I love it.

17

Did you read what I wrote? I spoke about missing the “target” simply because of the pop-up buttons. I did not talk about the “mechanism”.

First of all, I’m not always in the mixer. Secondly, the size of the target depends on the width of the channel.

The problem I described is nothing at all like that. Not even close. It’s not about “getting it”.

This is a very good point. Unfortunately we could have said that at any given point in time. At any given point in time it’s arguably easier to learn a new paradigm than to adjust to slight changes, in the sense that you speak. The problem is even if this person switches over to 6.5 there’s no way to know Steinberg won’t do the same thing again. They’ve done it once. Know what I mean?

This isn’t to say that change is always for the worse, but contrasting to PT the difference is huge. To my recollection PT has been essentially the same user experience for like an eon. One could argue that that’s a bad thing and not progressive enough, but one thing that has been hugely beneficial is that any PT engineer can sit down at a PT workstation and the software has pretty much been the same in terms of GUI and key commands.

18

Oh, so it is the same in Nuendo then… funny you couldn’t bring yourself to mention before; would have saved me thinking I was being helpful with my response.

And for the record, I disagree with you in that I don’t believe the GUI does make this particular control harder to use than it need be.

As someone else said, it is a huge target, thin mixer channels or not - try the Channel Settings window or the Inspector. Piece of cake, really. easy peasy.

19

Lydiot, I have no personal beef with you, but I’m going to jump into this because I think it illustrates the point. This is probably still on topic, since the OP was asking about not just the app but also Steinberg’s direction.

So I think the difference between my take and Lydiot’s take on the panner is pertinent. Lydiot points out the panner as evidence that Steinberg is marching rearward in (some/many/most???) changes that occurred in 6.5 relative to 5.5.

A couple of quotes:
" For us that aren’t 18 years old any longer some cursor use is very frustrating because one has to find a very small zone to trigger the desired event."
And
“Sometimes I just get the feeling that the people making these decisions aren’t actually working on the stuff or talking to users that work on the stuff full time and therefore don’t really understand the implications of their decisions.”

As politely as I know how, let me ask, what makes you think you need to click on either edge of the Panner? You can click dead center on the Combined Panner in the Mixer or Project window and do everything you want or need to do. Kind of like the aforementioned Location Bar. Not to offend, but I don’t think you “get it” yet. The fact that there is a button on the left edge of the Panner section in the Mixer to disable the Panner that pops up when you want it but takes up no space and doesn’t clutter the GUI is a plus, not a minus to me. No need to get anywhere near the left edge in order to move the image to the right…or left.

And so, again, I say different (and I think better) tools require a rethink to take advantage of. As far as the Project window. I have the contextual Crosshair Cursor enabled in Prefs. As I roll the mouse over the Panner in the Inspector, the mouse changes to Crosshair mode when it’s “valid”. It’s a completely usable sized zone. The mouse can be anywhere in that area that changes to a Crosshair near the Panner and you are set. No need to go to the left or right side. Anywhere gets the same results. Again, Location Bar is the paradigm, not traditional panner. It’s better in every way, in my opinion. Just took a moment to rethink and remap my perspective.

Now, I expect that N7 will move some Mixer paradigms to the Project/Inspector side. Which I will see as improvement and others will see as a debacle, I suspect.

To the OP: Yes, the demo is 400 hours of fully functional use. What’s to lose? I, for one, think Steinberg is making generally good decisions, with some great ones and a couple of brain farts. Kind of like me. I think this thread illustrates that a lot of that perspective depends on how set in your ways you are.

(Yes, I expect some pushback. It’s OK. I’m a little worn out with the “6.5 is bad” show anyway. It’s not. It’s the best software I can find for making music at a professional level after 35 years of doing it.)

20

Well at least you got to make a sarcastic comment, right? That should be some consolation.

And ‘no’, I actually do appreciate your input. The original poster asked for opinions and you’re voicing yours which is exactly what he asked for. That’s a good thing. We don’t have to agree.

I don’t find panning to be a “huge target” in the inspector, which is what I typically use for this type of thing. Like I said, I find I hit the buttons which appear when I try to grab just one side of this combined panner. I suppose I disagree with the wisdom of hiding buttons and then making where they are, triggering a different function than the area appears to be triggering while they’re invisible. Do you see my point? No button visible = you see the slider. You see the slider = you expect a certain behavior. Move the mouse over, the button appears, and you get a different behavior. I think the space is too small. And here’s the thing: There’s unused space available. Is there any good reason for not using that real estate to make the buttons permanent?

I find the same to be true for inserts in the mixer (I realize the panner looks different there - a bit inconsistent perhaps). With narrow views opening up a plugin can be maddening because rather than getting it to open up you get a dialog box for instantiating a plugin instead.