Nuendo-7.5 Pro

Of course what goes for exporting (add pro options) should also go for importing (add pro options). Let’s hope it’s on the way :-S

Steinberg as far as Neundo goes will be looking up the food chain not down to FCPx. Productions using Location Sound are to a large extent willbe going to post houses using Nuke, Scratch, Baselight and the like. Oh and yes Avid.

It is really unfortunate the issue Won’t be addressed until the later half of 2017 but the marketing importance of game audio, ATMOS and VR audio trumps. I take a lot of solace in that both Steinberg and the beta team have this matter at the top of the pile. Maybe is will get bumped up the schedule.

I don’t know a thing about marketing and project management, but I do know that I and most other users have bought Nuendo as an audio post tool. To hear that I need to wait not only for Cubase but now also the game audio market (that I could not care less about) while I desperately wait for stuff to be implemented kind of hurts.

Oh, of course Nuendo should be looking up the chain and not down to FCPX. FCPX is just not ready yet for real production workflow. I just wanted to add that it’s terrific software and if Apple can up their ante on FCPX’s pro features over the next years, maybe it’s something that will be considered in the future. For now every try I made exchanging audio with FCPX, be it Logic Pro X or otherwise, was not a pleasant experience. And mixing in FCPX is really not cool. There are an increasing number of projects, short films, documentaries and even Hollywood productions (Focus with Will Smith) that used FCPX. But I have no idea how they managed their audio and all.

Hehe, I understand. I, for one, deeply care about game audio. But I don’t work with teams that can afford those expensive middleware solutions as WWise or FMOD. I’m interested to have workflows for game audio that integrate better with the game environments such as Unreal and Unity. So I’m looking forward for what might come in this area. For Steinberg, game audio is probably a newer market. I don’t think audio post has huge growth potential overall. There are the big players that have split up the market between themselves like Avid, Adobe, Steinberg, … So you can mostly only lure away users from the competition. Maybe you can lure more people to your product if you have functions tailored specifically to them. And game audio is a field that is increasingly complex but has only little workflow support in today’s DAWs. It’s all manual work and no interface between DAW and game today. That’s a different story for 3D artists, they have lots of integration to optimize their 3D creations for specific engines and game systems. And for Steinberg, it makes sense to have a foot in the door and show they have cool stuff in that area. You can look better than Avid in this space. It’s probably not easy convincing longstanding post houses to switch to Nuendo from PT. It’s easier to show people in the game audio industry that you have functions no other competitor has, where PT has nothing special to show.

I wish the post audio market were bigger and more money to be made. This would make more resources available for development :wink:

Well, arguably “audio post” includes game audio, and it’s a good market to be present in for a DAW manufacturer. In the near future there’s possibly better opportunities for growth in that field than replacing PT in larger productions where field recorder workflows are more important.

For the mid-/lower-end productions, especially for TV, I think there’s also a better opportunity for growth, and at those levels we’re more likely to find less “correct” workflows. So while I agree that it’s a welcome addition I have to say that I probably also agree with the priority of game audio over this… and I’m not even in game audio or VR at all so there’s actually no benefit to me there…

In fact, there is less missing to make Nuendo very efficient and powerful for Audio-Film-Postproduction. It could really be the DAW what have all inside to have a very very effective workflow. And i heard something about yahama teams up with harrison to make next gerneration mixing desks. For me the strategy isn’t really clear hehe
because PT have no Loudness meter, no Media Bay, no ADR stage etc… but still many clients and production houses ask after the PT session once the job is done. Every major movie comes as PT session in the local dubbing stages. So i dunno, i really like nuendo, but at least its a tool to achieve a certain result, sometimes you need to combine tools or use specific tools for specific work.

It’s one of those things where if you have a working system in place you don’t want to change things too much. Swapping from PT+SoundMiner+VirtualKaty+Whatever to Nuendo would mean Downtime with a possible risk of eating up revenue, plus training engineers on new software or hiring new engineers etc… all of it is probably simply not worth it for the bigger players. A fully loaded PT system with those other softwares is really a drop in the bucket if you have 100+ million dollar movies going through your mix stage. Heck, updating software is even less.

As for the PT session after the job is done; I asked about that several times on Gearslutz, and after pulling some teeth it seems to me that all it is is stems laid out on labeled tracks, meaning not the actual mix with plugins. I’m not sure if that’s true for bigger mix stages, but it certainly is for a fairly large part of the market that demands PT sessions once done. So, since that’s the case one can easily mix in Nuendo and simply import/save in PT after for delivery, assuming the mix is ok to do in Nuendo of course. The client wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Depends, some clients wants everything, like M+E, Stereo-Downmix, LT-RT-Downmix, IT-Mix, Stems and even the session as is, some do not. The bigger the company and the project, the more they want :wink: in some big audio post houses they have guys working 40 hours a week just bouncing sessions.

Sure. I’m just saying that the answers I got essentially made two interesting points, first that what was required was only the stems/mixes as consolidated files in a PT session with appropriate routing, which means that one can spit all of that out of Nuendo and then lay it into a PT session and hit save. Nobody would know the difference. Secondly, that the requirements from the clients were actually non-specific and that a lot of people therefore delivered as I mentioned (consolidated files in a PT session).

The fundamental issue with supplying an actual mix session is two-fold; a) there’s no guarantee that the mix will play back other than in the same studio it was created (and even that assumes the studio stays backwards compatible) because of plugins used etc, and b) if you’re feeding one master PT DAW from slaves in a really big production then you compound that problem xfold.

So that’s why I was saying that this particular issue to me seems to not be as bad as I initially thought in many cases.

Yes I agree we need a good conform solution for Nuendo.
Below are most of the current solutions (I think):

But there are options, not that many but still.
• EDL based conform in Titan (exports AES31 or PT session)
• Metadata based conform using PTHD only (hit and miss in my experience)
• EDL and Metadata based using EdiLoad and PTHD
• Metadata based conform using Pyramix
• Metadata based conform using Sadie
• Basic filename conform using Nuendo only in conjunction with a text editor and possibly some scripts
• Assemblerator (only assembles within a PT session though and is quite old)
• Using Nuendos built in reconform engine but this is not a very efficient way and also quite slow way to conform a program (assemblerator is similar IIRC).

They all mostly work but they don’t all work all the time and not always perfectly.

IMHO Titan has the largest flexibility as it can handle data in many ways and shapes, but it does come with quite a learning curve when it starts to become a little bit complex. And yes it relies on properly exported Audio EDL’s.

No tool works with incorrectly ingested source media and messed up workflows. Or when filenames are not correct and folder structures are messed up.

This is a really good discussion to this point that clearly delineates the issue. Hopefully Timo and others from Steinberg see this.

There’s a significant cost in switching. And I think many of us agree that Nuendo does many things better than PT. Or we wouldn’t be here in the first place. But, I’m afraid, if Steinberg wants to lure away PT users, it’s not enough being better in some areas. It has to be a groundbreaking experience to make the switching cost worth it. Functions nobody else has come up with that make doing movie, TV and other sound work so much more efficient that everybody asks themselves how they could live without it. So when the decision of upgrading or switching is on the table, a switching becomes at least likely. Everybody operates on low margins and the pressure from clients gets bigger and bigger. At some point a switch makes economic sense.
Also for new studios I imagine, if they have to make the decision, PT or another software: “It doesn’t matter if everybody uses PT around here, with Nuendo, we can save so much work and it does all the importing and exporting so rock solidly that we can afford not choosing PT.” Here, it’s even easier.

I feel it is like with some of the Apple breakthrough products. The iPhone certainly was not the first phone. The phone market was saturated with feature phones and they worked well. Nobody knew what else they would want, the phone did what it was supposed to do. You could make phone calls and send SMS.
Until you suddenly you could have this powerful internet connected computer in your hand that was accessible, did emails, played music, was easy to use, you could load with apps etc.
Now I think Microsoft has a great phone operating system by now, too, after some iterations. And I’m sure it does some things better than any iPhone. But just being a bit better isn’t enough. Nobody wants those phones apparently, Microsoft is losing billions of dollars on them.
And between Android and iOS, it’s pretty much down to preference. Am I more an Android user or iOS user? Those systems are so good head to head, you cannot really lure away Android users with a new iPhone model. Any new iPhone has not enough great new features to make Android users switch. You need something groundbreaking.

And I’m sure there is a lot of potential in today’s workflows, especially in some audio areas like games, to do significant improvements.

Nuendo has far more option than PT in many fields, like someone wrote before its very good on audio for games, hopefully VR soon, ADR, EDL reconform, etc…
So for me Nuendo is world better than PT. But still, a few features are missing to make it really usable for film postproduction workflow. And i wouldn’t only show in the PT direction, Pyramix also gets very very nice features for sounddesigner (like their “MediaBay” where you can store everything).
What makes me sometimes a bit angry is that nuendo is so close to be THE DAW with the best workflow that i wish it had those features already, or maybe tomorrow :smiley: Nuendo has really almost everything inside, it just need to be pushed a bit further, and then its like apple, you got everything you need right inside, no third party software.
To the Nuendo developer: you do a very nice job, keep going on, you’re almost there :wink:

Frankly, I expect every Pro company to make magic happen (at least it should look like magic to the user). They should be laser focused to make their product “just work”. Maybe this sounds arrogant, especially from somebody only doing relatively small projects compared to you guys. Take it as you will.

But here’s what I mean:
Remember old analog modems? After switching on you had to enter cryptic commands (AT&FE1Q0V1X4&C1&D2) to initialize the modem, set it to the correct speed, then make it dial a number. You had to have some computer science degree to operate that thing.
Stories of old times. Some smart engineers figured out a way for cable modems to choose the correct frequency bands to their ISPs, protocols, speeds, and get other relevant configuration directly from the ISP. The browser figures out the download protocol automatically, too. FTP? HTTP? Or encrypted HTTPS? And TCP has clever speed throttling mechanisms so no packet is forgotten or lost. To the average user it looks like magic.

I’m sure this took an incredible amount of research, figuring all that out and make it “just work”.

But I’m asking myself, why is there even a market for VirtualKaty, AA Translator, X2Pro and other such tools? Why does Nuendo show error messages when importing certain AAFs? In my opinion, Steinberg should investigate every export format of every industry-relevant competitor, study its quirks, where they deviate from the file standard.

Software X exports mixed sample rate AAF even though the standard says this is not allowed? Nuendo should detect that and every other quirk in the format and just import it, convert anything it needs to to make it work.

Why are we still in an age where users are confronted with errors and then have to google all day, ask questions in forums until they find out there’s an incompatibility between X and Y. And why are they responsible for finding a solution? Or even buying expensive 3rd party tools?

Imagine Nuendo importing any freaking AAF without the slightest hiccup (I just last week got a Premiere AAF where Nuendo showed me an error and misplaced 10% of clips on the timeline, happy bug hunting). Conforming to EDL or metadata flawlessly, no matter what crime the other software vendor did to it its exported file. Working around every quirk. Steinberg not requiring their users to be computer engineers but letting them be sound engineers, letting them focus on their work, not master google search and HEX editor skills.

If there are processes or workflows where users lose a lot of time on because of errors, incompatibilities, manual work, or where there are error prone steps in which hours of work are lost… finding all these inefficiencies and ironing them out is what needs to be done.

I know this is a LOT of legwork. It’s a HUGE amount of work. Probably boring, too. Looking at every relevant software package and every way it exports files. But once done, this appears to users as supernatural! The moment you don’t have to spend your time googling and working around obscure errors. Importing anything and everything. No 3rd party tools. It just works. Like magic.