My one big hope for N6, and biggest, most frustrating issue with versions 4x and 5x:
As a large editing project develops, and various clip processing is applied, save time increases, often to an intolerable degree. Many of us have experienced this problem… though in my search here to avoid redundancy I haven’t seen anything about this specific cause.
Trashing the cache files gives blessed relief for the the time it takes for them to rebuild, but the only cure I’ve found is to bounce all edits and trash all unused files in the pool.Of course, that means saving multiple versions of the project as it develops, which is a huge waste of space.
It’s a real buzz-kill, not to mention time-waster; plus, due to the lag between hitting “save” and the indication that processing is going on, if you’re working fast (which some of us like to do for professional reasons, right?) and happen to get trigger-happy while the process is going on, chances of file corruption are significant. Just happened here-- I’m about halfway through a 30-hour project.
I understand that autosave does it faster… but do we trust it? I had to go back three .bak versions before I found one that worked. Not a confidence-builder.
Seems like a good place to apply some creative resources. Anybody else still aggravated by this?
This issue has been in Nuendo for many years. I reported it to support and local reps at least 5-6 years ago, and it is one reason I had to look at other DAW options - namely the corruption problem.
The save time is inconsequential compared to the corrupted project that it causes. I turned off autosave back in N3-N4 for this reason and got into the habit of saving to new files with every single save, and only saving when nothing else was going on - yes it does kill work speed to sit and wait for a save every few minutes. And, if you do corrupt a project doing this (or anything else), you can’t simply start a new project or open an old one, you have to restart Nuendo or the new or reopened older project can be corrupted as well (not always, but often).
This has always been the most critical bug in Nuendo for me, and the biggest reason to use ProTools. Losing hours, or even minutes of scoring work is simply not acceptable. I honestly can’t believe it’s still here.
I personally think Steinberg should consider dropping everything and fixing this corruption bug, and the hang on exit issue. These are the two main bugs that I know convinced a few of my colleagues to drop Nuendo.
I still use autosave, but make sure I have the project fully backed up on another drive… and consolidate my edits every couple of hours. There’s something very wrong with this picture!
Has this ever been actually recognized as a problem by the Steinberg team?
Again, it would be more than nice to have this dealt with in the next release. I’m not going anywhere, nor getting hysterical about it… but I am extremely tired of dealing with this long-time unresolved issue.
I don’t think Steinberg has ever acknowledged this problem. History seems to show that the only problems that are addressed are ones that cause significant clamour among users and can be easily reproduced with little effort.
Unfortunately, that eliminates about 80% of the bugs in most software applications.
Since ProTools does not suffer this corruption problem, it remains the most reliable DAW on the market. It is unfortunate as I prefer Nuendo for scoring, and ProTools is still lagging behind for that task in the midi department.
I would generally advise turning off autosave as that can also cause this error if there is too much other processing happening when an autosave kicks off. But as you’ve found, it is a two-edged sword as frequently saved .baks can also provide a more frequent recovery point and less work lost.
Chewy - were you using VIs or significant midi in this project that corrupted? (And no, it is not related to a 3rd party plugin.) After several years to dealing with it, I am positive of that. But since it seems not to occur to most post guys running all audio, it could be related to some other more composition, VI, or midi related function in Nuendo (and Cubase?).
Please, please, please fix this Steinberg. There is no way we could ever provide a perfect scenario to reproduce this, but it is a very real problem, and a very real hindrance to Nuendo’s reliability reputation.
No VIs nor midi on this project; I’m mastering an audiobook.
And… the corruption problem IN THIS CASE (this in no way is meant to negate or diminish anything you’ve said about corruption issues) appears to be due to a failing hard drive. I’m in the process of rescuing what I can of the project now.
The long save time, of course has always been a problem regardless of HD condition.
I find save times in Nuendo no worse than Pro tools, TBH. In fact, for me it is much more dodgy in Pro Tools, where autosave can easily crash the session if I am too quick accessing a menu, for example. At least Nuendo just shuts me out for a while.
However, I do agree that it would help if there was a way to stop certain things from being saved every time. I know that in lots of cases it makes sense to save the state of every plug, but this is what takes so much time for me. If it was possible for Nuendo to know when something had been changed, and then only save the changes, it could be almost like a snapshot, and done on the fly. I know that there are some applications that can do this sort of thing (even using a RAM cache to do the saving) and I think that this would be the way forward for Nuendo.
I do use Autosave and have never had corrupted projects, but I don’t use a lot of processing, so that might help
All I know is that I was able to radically reduce the time it takes to save projects by moving them to a Solid State Drive. The save time for a particular test project went from 8.5 seconds to under half a second! I can only imagine what a time saver it would be working with huge projects.
Other than that my projects get backed up to a backup disk automatically a couple of times per day.
More power to you if the way you work does not make your save times intolerable!
But… regardless of what happens in Pro Tools… once the number of edits/processes in a Nuendo file reaches a certain level, the save time can become very problematic… anywhere from 5 to 10 and more seconds of “spinning beach ball” until edits are bounced to disk and unused files are removed from the pool/project.
Gets to be a real drag on process-heavy projects such as reality TV with lots of bad location sound, requiring a lot of RX… or, as in my present case, a home-recorded audio book, 30+ hours in length, broken into 30 minute segments with thousands of edits and various sound quality treatments (noise reduction, normalizing, etc). Whole project is subject to QC review, and there are inevitably fixes, so it would naturally be best to keep the edited tracks intact and in the project. But you just can’t do that and keep working to speed after a threshold of edits/processes has been reached, and this is what I’m hoping might be fixed in N6.
We’ve been living with it for a long time. There are workarounds, as described previously in this thread. But the problem remains. May you never encounter it!
But for the rest of us… it’s a pretty big deal, and as csd opined, the kind of thing that really deserves some serious attention. It’s about time it was fixed.
@ Martijn:
Yeah, I have an SSD as well… and it’s awesome. Insane how much it speeds things up. But it doesn’t solve the present problem, once the threshold described above’s been reached. And a simple backup doesn’t take care of the problem; you still have to go through the steps of bouncing edits and removing old files… it can obviously be done (I do it every day), but it shouldn’t be this much trouble; it’s a workflow killer, and should be fixed.
