I understand that a thread exists on this topic, and will understand if this post gets folded in with the others. But that thread is now ancient, and this serious, long-standing issue really needs to be dealt with. I’d like to make sure I’m doing my part in promoting action towards a real solution.
It happened again today, even after re-starting both Nuendo with VST Connect Pro and Connect Performer (both the latest versions) after every chapter. Situation as follows:
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Initiate VST Connect session, recording a single narrator. Local file appears in the inspector; all’s fine… Event monitors indicate’s all’s well. No red lights-- everything stays green.
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Stop recording and immediately go to download HD file. All’s good.
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Restart Nuendo on my side and Performer Connect on the client side. Re-establish connection and record next chapter. Finish it, Download HD file. Good again.
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Restart Nuendo on my side and performer Connect on the client side. Reestablish connection and record next chapter. Finish it, and go to download HD file. It is not available, and does not exist on the client’s computer.
I can’t list this as a bug, because I can’t predictably repeat it. But it’s happened, apparently randomly, three times on this project alone.
As I mentioned in the other thread, I’m doing my lo-res files at 24 bit, and with Tonal Match and some clip gain I’m able to get acceptable results compared to the HD versions, and we’re running a redundant system on the client end but…
Obviously, this is NOT optimal.
I’m going to keep recording this project (which is going to be a pretty high-profile audiobook) for the next two days, and then will be completing recording in a couple of weeks. I’m very much enthusiastic and willing to work with those of you who are involved in solving VST Connect issues to get to the bottom of this problem. Clearly I’m not the only individual experiencing it.
Please, let’s figure it out! This is such a great way to work, but this little glitch is maddening (and potentially catastrophic, from a production standpoint)!
Chewy
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First thing to try is to ask the Performer to apply the “Export for Local” function (in settings). This will create a zip file that you ask him or her to send to you.
Then load the npr project, unpack and apply “Load Local HD” from the VST Connect plugin.
If this does not reveal lost files, they don’t exsist, have not been recorded successfully, or are unknown to VST Connect for other reasons, like user deleted them, they have some “forbidden” characters (although that is not a known issue anymore), or the system fails to load for other reasons.
Thanks for responding, Musicullum.
I’ve done all of that, and the files do not exist.
The files were not deleted by the user, they apparently simply did. not get recorded on the Performer side.
I want to stress that there is no identifiable difference (for now, anyway-- the whole point of this exercise is to find out what might be going wrong!), between the four steps identified in my first post, other than the files not getting recorded on the Performer side.
Subsequent recordings DO get recorded by Performer., without any apparent change in the process. Internet speeds are good (200mb down, 100 up on my side, 1G up and down on the other side). Events indicators all consistently green and bars full. As I mentioned before, this has happened three times so far in my now six-day project. Starting on day 7 in an hour and a half, and will report back at the end of the day.
Chewy
End of day update here.
As an experiment, I started recording several seconds into the timeline to see if starting at 0:00:00 might be affecting remote HD files’ recording.
We didn’t have as many chapters today, as those we recorded were much longer than yesterday’s, but there were no issues. Will continue to monitor through the session tomorrow, where we’ll likely have more individual files recorded.
Unrelated, but maybe worthy of a feature request:
Internet on the remote side went down once during a long chapter. When back online, we found that the HD file had been recorded up to the point the internet failure. GREAT! And I was able to grab it from the client side HD folder and drop it in., with metadata intact. Also great.
But here’s the question in a case like that: would it be in the realm of possible future features to “reconnect” files to VST Connect once their connection in the manager has been lost?
Clearly, I know nothing of coding or the inner workings of VST Connect, so… just asking.
Will report on session progress at the end of the day tomorrow.
Chewy
And… today there were no issues with HD files not being recorded on the Connect Performer computer.
To recap from yesterday, the only thing I changed was to give the project plenty of preroll when hitting record. There are a few more sessions in store for this project, and I’ll. continue to report back.
But spending so much time with VST Connect over the past couple of months, this being my second long project in a row using it (they’re not sending us out on location as much as they used to!), I’m going to report whatever issues have been consistently coming up.
One particularly troubling situation we’ve been running into with this project is the degradation of sync over time. For instance, starting with an event monitor with solid green bars and no red “leds”, after an hour or more of recording the sync indicators (on the Studio side) show markedly lower levels., and ultimately dropouts start to occur. Stopping recording and starting again typically resets things to an acceptable level, but we had to shut down and restart a couple of times today.
Internet connection tests for both sides were at full capacity, at speeds reported in previous posts.
I also had a very strange situation where , after downloading an HD file, it could not be moved in the timeline. It was not locked in place by me. Apparently, somehow the track got corrupted; creating a new audio track and dragging the event to it solved the problem.
And that’s today’s situation in a nutshell.
Whatever issues there may be, working with VST Connect is vastly superior to what alternatives I’d have to contend with (Zoom, FTP, etc). Thanks to everybody who’s making this stuff work. It’s super, and my comments here are not complaints-- I want to participate in it’s being the best it can be.
Chewy