Yeah I know we could slip before… but compared to nuendo it’s like try to do it with your feet. Zzzzz
faders feel pretty good, about the same really. they play back smoother and though I’ve read about noisey faders, mine are very quiet on my MC control.
I would recommend moving to avid controllers but you definitely are going to want more than 4 faders so don’t bother until you can get a control and at least one mix at the same time. Right now I just have the control and transport… trust me I’m feeling very temporary right now. I’m spending the time learning it while editing on 32bit. I’m waiting for 64bit support… hopefully this will happen around the time I can afford a couple mc mix’s. For now I’m using the control and the transport for editing, I don’t think the limited faders is usable for serious mixing. And I’ll continue to use the mackies for that for a while.
Transport is worth getting I guess but I wouldn’t set it’s a must have. It adds flexibility and detailing… one example is, you can set up a single button to tell both of the wheel to slip the audio in the region… you can set the wheel on the transport to do big moves and the wheel on the control to do little moves. (requires some programming). The control has a notched wheel that I like for small frame moves. The transport wheel is more weighty and spins freely. I really like it for clip gain. I’d always used the mouse wheel for this, 1db at a time. The transport wheel uses 0.1db increments… very cool. If you like to tweek and customize like I do, go for it cause it has a zillion uses.
The app sets that eucon ships with are great, but they take as much time to learn as if you were using a brand new DAW. Currently, I’m building a custom app set for N5, when it’s finished, I will port it over to protools and use the identical lay out. I’ll just change the commands to do the protools equivalent. It’s very uncomfortable right now to not be fast on it… but the light at the end of the tunnel is that I’ll be faster, on anything. $$$$
Every single nuendo command that is available in the keycommands list can be assign to a button via eucon. You can assign to a touchscreen button or a hardware button, or both. All buttons can carry key strokes or strings of keystrokes. All buttons can carry surface commands like jumping to a new page of buttons. All buttons can carry combinations of all the above. For example… I have a mixer button… it opens my mixer, and goes to a page full of mixer functions like show/hide, inserts,eqs, edit channel settings. On that page there is a close mixer button that also takes me back to the previous page. You can totally design your own star trek computer and it’s very cool. I just finished designing a QWERTY keyboard page including modifiers. My goal is to eliminate the keyboard all together so it does not have to be in front of me.
Touch screen visual surround panner with access to everything on the v5 panner. Including reset sort of, when you click down on a knob it resets to default on whatever it’s controlling. I’ve confirmed it in protools cptk also. controls are a little different but it’s the same thing. I had always been bothered by the fact that I couldn’t access the panner with midi controls other than x and y axis… this solves that.
Quick access to quick controls, All 8 are on the same page and are independent of your touchscreen buttons or menu system. It would be cool if the new right/click quick control features that are coming were eucon assignable too… meaning, I can have a softkey that says… assign QC1. and whatever I’m hovering over is now QC1. I’m not going to hold my breath for that though lol.
quick access to tracks - taking some getting used to. on the front page of the screen there is a rep of all the tracks in your session, you can select them by touching them and the faders jump to it. Be aware though that it does NOT behave like the MC pro where you can put any channel on any fader… that is doable but it is not a fast task.
you can select, access and remove insert plugs right from the surface. Clicking down on the knob brings the plug in on the screen, pressing the back menu button will close the plug in. Quick and smart.
You can select and control all routing and levels of sends as well as direct routing and group channels.
you have access to the nuendo EQ’s also.
CONS:
Plug in parameters can not be customized, you have to page through them all the functions are abbreviated. A multi function plug like izotope alloy is almost unusable because of this. I already own a Novation SL zero which is just about as wide as the MC control, I use this to handle plugins because I can customize the parameter layout. But using the mc to open and close the plugs - which in turn get read by automap on the novation… it’s pretty seamless. I’m putting the novation behind the MC and will be drilling a hole in the novations case to make room for the CAT5 coming out of the MC.
The fact that the faders do not respond to custom mixer views in Nuendo SUCKS. You can set up mixer views on the surface but you have to do a lot of set up. Pointless for me right now with only 4 faders. The mackie system is still hooked up and I don’t have 64bit support yet anyway, but I’m still trying to figure out how this will impact my workflow which was heavily dependent on the mixer views and mackies ability to control them.
Protools Eucon support is minimal. the majority of the app set is firing off key commands. Consider this, the default neundo app set has 84 pages on the touchscreen alone. Protools has 24. Not a deal breaker and it’s better than nothing. I’m sure the eucon coverage will get better with more PT updates.
If you have any other questions, shoot
