I’ve read two whole web pages on Steinberg’s site about Nuendo, but I still can’t work out what it does. 
It’s for live recording in some way. Can anyone tell me what it does and why it’s different from Cubase?
Thanks
You can think of Nuendo as Cubase plus additional features for large-scale audio post-production tasks, such as Dolby Atmos mixing, additional dialogue recording, asset management for game audio, and so on. Nuendo Live is a different product, focused on recording live performances, e.g. from the sound desk in a live music venue.
I’m about to get a license and have been using the demo. On the surface hard to tell it’s not Cubase. It opens Cubase files just fine (and Cubase reads Nuendo files equally well) and has essentially the same menus and windows (most of them). Some features have filtered from Nuendo to Cubase, such as the export window I believe. The main reason to get it is specific features, such as 7.1 mixing (Cubase only goes to 5.1), Dolby Atmos (new feature), plugins and 3rd party sound effects and such. For sound design it’s better than Cubase, but you can get by without it probably. For game audio it has Perforce and Wwise integration, and while nice you can just as well work with those on the side.
So why get it at all? Workflow mainly. Mine is Dorico (scoring) → Cubase (stemming) → Nuendo (mastering) → game. I could combine the last two two steps in one application but it’s similar to the Modes idea Dorico has. It’s different ‘hats’. On this project I have to be composer and mastering engineer, and using different tools with different focused set ups helps with that. I can be an engineer and a composer, but can’t do them at the same time!
Thanks, all.
That’s certainly confirmed it’s not something I need, then!