Moving Events Between Tracks

Nuendo
,
1

I’ve asked for this before… but i’ll Try again.

I’d like to be able to select an event, or several on a track, right click and have a “Move to…” option which drops down to reveal a list of tracks.

The action could warn of over laying existing events and offer to make a new track, and perhaps offer multi-channel to mono conversion ( and reverse ) if track type didn’t match.

I spend too much time wrangling audio from editors around in a project. I know it’s basic but if Nuendo is actually a post TOOL I need it to do some more of the grunt work.

2

You need to work with better editors. Or make sure the picture assistants clean up the project before exporting the AAF for you.
:mrgreen:

What I would like to see is a way to colorise events based on metadata (track info=channel names) so it would be easier to organise stuff faster. However I really do not feel the need to be able to move stuff between tracks in other ways than what we have already.
What scenario would you feel that would be helpful?

3

LOL!

Picture assistants?? That’s funny. I’m happy for you that you live in such rarified company. I’m afraid my world is full of nastily configured edits which get pumped to me as a fast as possible to fix even faster. Audio all over the place…

That you don’t want to move events between tracks in other ways does nothing to help me. That’s what I want Nuendo to do. Thus a feature request.

Which ways do you use by the way? Perhaps I’m missing something.

4

I use my mouse to move events mostly, but when I have to sort through a messy trailer delivery or what not I may just use the move up/down commands, but that only works if you can work with some specific structure.
I often use the pool to colorise and sort events, with this I mean that location sound are almost always easily identifiable in the pool list, so I select them in the pool, then issue the command select in project, and then change their color, thus I can see where all the dialog from location is. Then I copy all the dialog down to new tracks, then I sort in the pool again, often music is identifiable as well, but not always, if it is I give that a color as well. This can help.
But yes if you have to work with hopeless editors and no assistants (we have four picture editing assistants on staff) you just wish thee was someone around to fix things.

As far as I know ( I may be wrong about this) FCPX is the only NLE to have material sorting in its default “DNA” so it “knows” what is what (IF the material has been labeled correctly to begin with). We use MediaComposer exclusively at this time, and it has no such features, normally with messy editors (most that work here are semi structured at least) the assistants sorts through the project and separates stuff to different tracks. We need to do this as composers want the temp music separated from the rest of the audio, and for immediate ADR we need dialog separated from fx and music, so doing a full sorting of all material is beneficial.
Yes I am aware that my situation is very different to yours, so I have full respect for that you would love it if your DAW could help out a bit more, and I agree, I just dont see how move to track commands would help.

…

Have you tried to do it using a PLE macro?
Not sure if it is doable, but may work for you.

5

So here’s my process

I get either an AAF or OMF plus a reference Video with the editor’s audio… I can’t ever call it a “mix”.

You are correct FCPX can break things into Dialog/Effects/Music and further… a Role for each character in each location if the editor sets the Roles up. It’s brilliant and I’ve done it for projects I’ve done picture editing on. But most editors ( particularly documentary ) still use Premiere and just stick audio wherever it fits on a track… set a level… and move on. I regularly get all Camera tracks ( 2-8 these days ) which have camera mics, wireless mics , booms, … usually I only need one of those.

So my first job is to move through the project deleting extraneous events, breaking multi channels up in to mono or the other way around …

Now I set up Nuendo tracks to hold each type of audio taking particular care of dialog and separating locations so I can process per track where possible… “interviewee 1 in office”, Interviewee 1 in lab” , Interviewee 2 at home, Interviewee 2 in car “, Stereo Music, Location Room tones( which I have to manufacture usually! ), and so on… let’s call these “mix-tracks”.

Then I move through the Project again… as I come across each audio event I need to move it to the appropriate “mix-track” from it’s rather random origin in the video edit tracks. It’s not uncommon for the editor to have only used a couple of tracks for “Dialog” so they contain all the different “kinds” of speech in the project. Currently in Nuendo, for each event I can cut/paste, or select then Command drag the event (to keep sync ). Either way I have to scroll through the project tracks from the origin track to reach the destination mix-track. In the end I usually have 10 - 20 tracks for speech… which as I said, originated from a mashup of original tracks so it’s a lot of scrolling. Multiply 10 secs of scrolling up and back over hundreds of events and you get hours of wasted time.

So I just want to click on an event and move it to the appropriate “mix” track. Done . I also requested having an option to quickly create a new track for the event to go to in case I need it … again very common.

Once each audio “type” is on a mix-track I can EQ, compress, noise reduce and set a basic level across the track very quickly.

Then of course all the fiddly stuff can start.

If every thing in Nuendo that took 2 seconds could be done in 1 second the mix would take half the time. I know this is true from editing video in FCPX … it does the repetitive stuff at least twice as fast as other NLE’s so the edit moves very quickly. If the time saved was fractionally spent assigning Audio Roles my Nuendo life would be even easier.

But Editors… sigh. They are blind to FCPX and how much of their life they would get back.

Anyway, maybe this suggestion isn’t useful to anyone else… perhaps you are all working on scripted, sound stage, double system, auto conformed, ADR tightly-controlled-workflow types of jobs. That’s great. But me? Nope…

This request would help me. If it doesn’t get in the way of others work I’m gonna keep asking. Besides it would take an hour of the summer intern coder’s time to implement it. Pretty sure. :wink:)