Lets bring it inline.
Its coming soon !
Not today,
Probably not tommorow,
But someday.
It may include editable folder/groups, that also show in the mixchannel.
But probably not.
Hello!
This is my first post, so please be gentle… ha-ha!
25-years in? Wow… that’s serious devotion, & you’ve clearly experienced more than most. That said, I’ve noticed your growing dissatisfaction with Nuendo v13+. Could you explain what about the latest version has unsettled you?
Sorry in advance if I’m bringing up a sensitive topic, that wasn’t my intention. I’m fairly new to all of this & would really appreciate an honest, unfiltered perspective on why you might consider switching from decades of loyalty to Nuendo over to Pro Tools.
Thank you!
3 Likes
Since you responded to twelvetwelve who responded to me I’ll just add the way I see it (sorry for all the text);
First, there is close to zero communication on the forum. Just for fun I picked three officials at the Avid forum and between them you have an average of two posts per day. The areas cover PT, post production and the s-series controllers.
When you have little to no communication I think there are two main problems you run into; a) we don’t know if the issues we run into are bugs, design flaws or user error, and if it is a code problem if and when it will be fixed, and b) we have no idea what the direction of the software is. I understand that SB has no obligation to respond to every user or every user request, but over the years the silence “accumulates”. As a sort of last ditch effort I composed several threads marked “feature request” and compiled what I thought were pretty well defined and reasonable requests. My problem with that is that even though I think the posts were well structured there is not even an acknowledgement that they were read. I’m not trying to make myself sound great or anything, but compared to many posts I think mine were pretty easy to read and understand, and I am obviously available to expand on what I was requesting - should anybody ask.
Secondly, there are areas where Nuendo is behind and needs improvement, and it has been behind for years and years. With no communication it becomes reasonable after a while to just throw your hands up in the air and just think that this app and this company is not for you. Again, I understand that I’m not the center of the universe and that there are resources to be managed, but our experience is what it is.
Thirdly, and this to me is very important, Nuendo is a post-production focused app and because of that some functionality is essential. Importing AAFs is one example. If I can’t import the audio I’m supposed to work on then I can’t even start doing my work. This is obvious. What is apparently less obvious is that a lot of users in the real world don’t have time or the social (“business”) capital to start going after assistant video editors to have them export according to our wishes when they have no problem with engineers using PT. So here we are, year after year begging for improved AAF import functionality and we get absolutely nothing. Not even a comment. Just yesterday I had, again for the millionth time, an AAF that a) failed to import but b) still placed GB’s of audio files in my folder and pool, yet c) imported 100% in Pro Tools. Why the hell are we forced to continuously beg for this to work? Just match what PT does.
I’ll add to the above that some of the bugs we run into are really nasty. So apart from something like AAFs which has been coded “correctly” but inadequately you then have straight up bugs or poor design that will come back and bite you in the ass when you don’t need it.
Lastly, stop reinventing the wheel. I just get the feeling that there is this idea that if they’re going to implement something then it has to be done in their own way, rather than almost copying the competition. Trust me, if I have a choice between getting what the competition gets as soon as possible and maybe getting something else at some undetermined point in time I’ll take the “clone”. Every time. VCAs? Linked tracks? Both half-assed and never fixed or improved. Automation system? Went their own way which was great, but now here we are with dumb things we have to look out for because they are counterintuitive plus features like “glide” that is a no-brainer in post. PT is the leader, do what they do. Innovate elsewhere.
Add all of the above together.
/rant
12 Likes
I appreciate your response here. Having dealt with AAF import bugs this week, I felt the pain first hand. Nuendo wouldn’t properly import the AAF of a 6 minute piece that I needed to mix for broadcast. I ended up importing it into Pro Tools, creating a new AAF there and then importing that into Nuendo (which worked).
Professionals with deadlines do not have the time to jump through hoops like this. This was a news piece for a weekly show given to me at the last minute. If the PT AAF wasn’t successful, I would have just mixed it in PT.
Bugs like this do not inspire the confidence of my team and the upper management (who are actively looking at Pro Tools alternatives) that I’m trying to convince to switch to Nuendo.
tg
1 Like
Just to be fair and transparent: It is my understanding that AAF functionality is technically correct in Nuendo and that problems pop up because other software don’t stick to the specification strictly enough, and that Pro Tools is just more “lenient” in its import-functionality.
However, I don’t care, because I’m still stuck with the problem. We both are.
2 Likes
That’s what made me leave Protools / Avid back in my studio days. We were a “Pro” shop… just not at the level of Hollywood/Mainstream Broadcast which is where everything seemed to focus. After two rounds of Digidesign/Avid refreshes ( as Mattias alludes to … just throw everything away!) it couldn’t be sustained.
Native solutions were maturing, and despite the fact that a full blown PT rig (still) looks like the ‘real deal’ we moved on.
Looking at the current PT subscripton model ( pay when you need it ) almost has me curious again, because even after 20 Years of using Nuendo for Post jobs, there are still “posty’ things I recall PT does better, and despite hoping for augmentations and refinements for post-style editing in Nuendo they just don’t come. When updates do arrive I’m constantly hoping for editing-workflow improvements …. ( ripple editing, a better multitool, more context menu control … there’s dozens of things ) but nothing ever changes in that respect. Not that I can’t get work done now…. that’s not in question, it’s just there are so many small ideas that could remove points of friction.
And Matthias is completely correct about AAF. Talk about required functionality. I get so many problems that take forever to work through. I sometimes wonder if SB ever fully test AFF archives from all the potential sources … Premiere, Resolve, PT, FCP Pro , Logic Pro ( via X2 Pro ) … I mean there aren’t *that* many.
Enough…
2 Likes
I suggest you ask the people of AA Translator.
https://www.aatranslator.com.au/
They have been working on their application for years (decades?) and they still can’t cover all of the exotic AAF interpretations of certain companies.
Best regards
Fredo
2 Likes
Fair comment… it’s hard. But are they tryIng?
After looking at AATranslator I note that they are dealing with complexity orders of magnitude beyond a single direct AAF import.
For SB DAW’s I see they take the approach of using a SB Track Archive, and don’t use AAF at all? Could using AATranslatior to import to Nuendo ( From NLE Premiere, FCPro, Avid, Resolve ) actually be done better than AAF directly? Have you any experience?
Thanks
1 Like
I’ve never been able to get AA Translator to run on Mac. I bought a license back when I was using a PC, and it worked brilliantly, but try as I might, I couldn’t get it run via Wine or Crossover when I switched back to Mac several years ago.
I often think about building a cheap PC (or buying one of those micro PC’s) just to run it.
tg
Sure - there are a lot of things but a few off the top of my head.
- User interface is a giant step backwards for usability. I’m not sure who is behind the design these days but they don’t seem to understand some of the fundamentals for a usable interface design.
- Project format changed with no option to backwards save. When working in a team environment you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place if you want to collaborate.
- The clip gain changes recently introduced are a huge step backwards step for speed/usability. They could have simply gone with a proven approach and copied what PT does as that’s had years of user testing to reach a mature point for design/functionality.
- VCAs have never worked properly since they were introduced but that seems to not be a priority over other less useful things.
- Automation is lagging behind the competition these days but doesn’t seem to have priority either.
- When things get introduced they’re often half-baked so you have to phase them out of your workflow. When they get “fixed” it’s often too little and too late since they seem to want to do it a different way and you can only hope it will get a re-design when it gets reworked years later. I can’t tell you how many features I’ve had to abandon after their “rewrites”.
- No real communication from Steinberg. Avid on the other hand has reps that will answer your questions where as with Steinberg it’s usually radio silence.
I could go on but changes in the new versions have meant workflow is no longer as efficient and it seems like Steinberg is committed to that path.
3 Likes
Well, for starters, the AA Translator people have build a tool that translates any transfer format into any other transfer format. Since the Steinberg track Archive is the format that includes the most parameters, it is obvious that they aim at the trustworthy .xml format.
I use AA translator mostly for translating PT projects. When we outsource Foley, they are delivered as PT sessions. Other formats (like AAF) are not as accurate in terms of transferring complex fades, etc…
I have never experienced problems with AA Translator, but I know my good friend @ErikGuldager sometime bumps into a problem, which is promptly solved by the AA Translator-people.
I run my business for more than 35 years, and most of my clients are not aware that we don’t use ProTools. And I think that no client cares how we get the job done.
Best regards
Fredo
7 Likes
I seriously don’t understand how/why Steinberg continues to operate this way. I only have an S3 and a MTRX Studio, but any time I needed assistance, the devs get back to me within 24hrs on Avid’s forums.
I’m sorry to say this, but I only see the devs pop up here a couple of days before and after an update or product launch. I really don’t think it is that difficult to either have a spokesperson who can directly communicate with the devs and give us feedback or have 1 or 2 of the devs be active here and acknowledge bugs/issues/potential fixes etc. The absolute silence and us forum users scrambling to figure out the issue is a pain.
Here’s hoping it improves…
1 Like
In all fairness, it depends on which forum/product. The “culture” at Steinberg is different within different dev teams, at least from my observations in recent years. I think that’s a holdover from the “older” Steinberg culture that has yet to catch on here with the Nuendo team. They didn’t get the memo yet from some of the other teams. But yes, the Nuendo team really does need to be more communicative! With you on that!
I agree, that could be true. I have seen a bit more dev activity over on the Cubase side whenever I pop over for music related issues. Robin used to be quite active on the Spectralayers forum, but seeing much less of him after the last release. Hope the Nuendo side picks up.
The absolute gold standard is the Dorico side of this forum. The Dorico developers are literally active every day, answering complicated questions in hours if not minutes. As a user, I cannot over-emphasise the effect this has on my own feeling about using Dorico. However steep a learning curve may be, you feel like you can accomplish everything because help is always right around the corner. I’ve never experienced such a level of dedication from any software developer. And it’s been like this since version 1 launched about 10 years ago. So it should be possible for the rest of Steinberg as well. Look to the Dorico team!
7 Likes
Yeah, this was a big factor for me when adopting Spectralayers. And the same applied for Nuendo, even if they were never as active as Robin Lobel.
Although I can somewhat locate it to the very controversial release of N13, it seems that the activity from SB in Nuendo forums kept diminishing and today there is almost none.
We get many important, disruptive bugs that although reported, go unadressed for years, with not even a simple acknowledgement from the team. It’s like Mattias said, we have no idea if it is known, being worked on, solveable, or what. Not to mention that new features seem to pop up out of the aether, with stuff that no one seems to have asked for, while highly desired features keep being ignored.
In the end I feel this does wear us down, and the general mood in this forums shows it. It gives us a feeling that we are unofficial beta-testers all the while being ignored, and that SB simply doesn’t care.
I mean, this IS an official forum after all. It’s the same login for the forum as it is for Steinberg website. There’s even tags for bug reports, etc.
They should take better care of their userbase. I don’t think they’ll ever get it to grow if we the ones that use it professionally are not happy about it and helping convince other users that they’d do good in migrating to Nuendo.
I must say I used to be much more enthusiastic about it, but not so much anymore. And I’m starting to see other options in an increasingly much better light.
It might help, or else I find the forum tends to work things out for itself.
1 Like
Yup! 
Exactly my previous point. The Nuendo team would benefit greatly by taking a memo from the Dorico team in this regard.
Let’s also not forget PG in the WaveLab forum. Post a question there, and you’ll often get a direct answer from the dev himself, or some veteran who knows WaveLab inside and out.
So the Nuendo team has good examples to look to and inspire them to communicate more….
I do believe Steinberg is changing and I think the Nuendo team will slowly shift in that direction. 
2 Likes
That, may be so and I don’t doubt that it is, however for a product such as that mentioned, you would want to dedicate more interactive time towards it, simply because of the presentation aspect of the application.
This would indicate to me he’s pretty busy with the next major version. A-ok with me 
2 Likes