I’m setting up a Nuendo project to quickly be able to render multiple stems. I’m using “export audio mix down”.
My questions is: If I use the batch export and choose particular group channels to export, will the effects sends that the instruments in these various groups are utilizing also be included in the recorded stems even though the send channels themselves are not routed to the particular stem groups?
If not, is there a workaround besides soloing and performing a separate mix down on each individual stem?
No they won’t. If you are wanting to batch export stem groups then you have to plan the mix like that from the start.
Nuendo has a great control room feature that lets you monitor multiple stem paths so you can set your session up with stem groups and monitor them simultaneously while you mix. Once the mix is done simply do your batch export of those stem groups.
For instance let’s say you have a piano instrument which has its own audio channel. The piano output you route to a group named KEYS. You use a send from the piano channel to send to a Reverb FX channel. The output of the Reverb FX channel you route to the group named KEYS. In this instance, when you export by groups you will get the piano and the reverb in one exported stem.
If however you route the output of the Reverb FX channel to a different group, REVERB, then what is sent to the Reverb FX channel will be split from the piano. So then if you do a batch export of groups KEYS and REVERB you will get one stem with the dry piano and one stem with just the reverb channel element, not the dry piano channel element.
Two rather simplistic examples, I know.
But I do this all the time and for me it is all about careful planning of the routing and what I want separate export control over, and it has always been a trade-off between flexibility and practicality. I have tended to keep things simple and create a one-to-one mapping between main groups and the stems I want to export. (Of course, sometimes it’s helpful to sub-group stuff before routing to a main group that maps to a stem you want to export.)
This has saved me MANY hours of laborious exporting.
Was that what you meant, or have I missed the point?
If you had multiple instruments sending to the same REVERB group, batch exporting the groups would not separate piano reverb element from say vocal reverb element, no.
I think to be able to batch export and keep the FX send elements separated you would have to have separate routing paths for them, even if the FX done on them are exactly the same. If it were practical to do so you could have multiple FX groups that all did the same thing but only received from specific instruments and outputted to separate groups. You could even link the duplicate channels so that whatever you did to one, the same was done to the others. But this is a burden on resources, tricky to manage, and the sum of the outputs is not necessarily exactly the same as if all instruments shared the same effect channel - especially dynamics control like compression.