Using a very long timeline with lots of Events I am puzzle by the inability to do a search for a specific Event.
If the Pool shows that an Event is used several times, and I “Select in project”, it will select all occurences. But I have not been able to find a way in the Project window, to go and listen to each one (a function like “Locate next selection”).
Or am I missing something here?
Thanks for your help
I don’t think you’re missing anything.
Could you give a case where you would do this and why, and maybe we can figure out a work-around if there is one?
I think the OP means the way how in PT when we select an edit window event selection, it is reflected as a highlighted item in the clip list on the right…
Maybe… 
I don’t think that’s it actually. He ends with “go and listen to each one (a function like “Locate next selection”)”, and that’s a different issue once the selection have been made.
Thanks for your answers.
What I mean is this: the pool shows that a certain clip is used 16 times in your timeline. You know that on one of these occurences you have do some special processing (or automation or combined it with other bits of sound somewhere or whatever) and you want to get to that piece of sound and copy-paste it where you need it again.
You launch a search in the pool and all the occurences of the clip are selected in your timeline. Good. But if you have many tracks and a very long timeline (40 hours+) with lots of sound everywhere, there is no way to jump from the first event selected to the next and find the one you are looking for. You’re simply stuck with scolling by hand and hopefully see what you’re searching.
So my question is: Once the selection has been made, is there a function like “go to/locate the next selection” (in the timeline) or is there any way to make a macro that would do this?
There is nothing in the manual to help. All I can see is that the search function is limited to the pool and to the hard drives, nothing for the Project (except the markers). Further, if you have spent time defining Regions with a name, there is no way to search for them in the pool and have them selected in the Project: you can only search for Events (not their Regions).
Locating and selecting specific events along a very long timeline is indeed a problem in Nuendo. You can select by name (or generate new names) using the Project Logical Editor. If you have selected a single event you can find it by pressing ‘L’ (Locate Selection Start). You could use a PLE preset and ‘L’ in combination in a macro.
Similar issues were discussed at length here:
Thanks for the cue Stingray. I am going to look into it tonight.
I am not sure it will get me anywhere since I have not found in Nuendo’s Commands anything that looks like " go to next/previous selection" which would enable to first select all occurences of an event in the Project and then scan them one after the other to find the one of interest.
As you mention, there is indeed a “Locate selection start/end”. But nothing in between. This one is mostly useful for a single Event, in case you have a long take.
Yes, of course, that’s what you need. But it isn’t there. So unfortunately there’s simply no easy solution… somebody else here might have a way of solving this using a sequence of PLE presets…
However, one possible workaround is to take the habit of inserting a marker for each event, and you can then locate events a little more easily by searching the markers (selecting a marker auto-scrolls to the position on the timeline). It’s also quite easy to insert markers for all events in a project using a macro.
Another technique might be to change the colour of the selected events using a PLE preset and then you can find them more easily along the timeline. Not perfect but it might help.
Another maybe somewhat annoying work around would be to first duplicate the track the events are on, delete all events on it, find the events on the original and then move them down. Or just create new blank track, move/duplicate them down and use the new track for navigation only.
Thanks for both your answers. I’ve spent a couple of hours working with the PLE and trying various macros. Nothing really works. I can only jump to the beginning or end of the selected Events in the timeline, not the beginning of each selected event.
Also when there are 50-60 tracks nested in Folder tracks, I have not been able either to make a macro that would open the appropriate folder track in which something is selected. At least that would have been something.
Yes, I also thought the only way would be to put a marker for the events. But then again, it becomes tedious to name appropriately each marker since that would mean naming the regions, naming the macros… too much paper work!
I already use markers extensively in different folder tracks so I can write notes, to dos and ideas for the various types of materials I have.
Colour coding, I’ll try that. That’s maybe the simplest thing to try.
So I guess I’ll leave it at that. The Search function and the Library management are for me the really weak parts of Nuendo. Which is quite surprising in our age of metadata. Using daily Nuendo in parallel/in sync to FCPX is a night and day experience in that respect and I often wish Steinberg would look into the way Apple’s team reconsidered on these aspects the whole structure of their app.
Thanks guys for helping!
Could you perhaps let us know what you’re missing, specifically, and how it affects workflows?
I think you’ll need to inform the userbase and then make it understand the benefits, then post a request in the feature requests section, and hope it gains traction. Otherwise I don’t really see it happening necessarily.
But when you ‘select in project’ in the Pool the folders are automatically opened.
I’m not sure what you mean by regions… if you mean regions within the sample editor I don’t know how they are relevant here. You’d have to explain your workflow in a very precise manner.
Anyway, I think I may have found you a solution. For revealing selected audio events in the Project window, track versions will help you. After selecting the events and the track where the selected events are found, try the following macro:
Edit - Copy
TrackVersions - New Version
Edit - Paste at Origin
Transport - Locate Selection
… then use ‘N’ and ‘B’ to navigate through the events. If you wish you can delete the track version(s) after use. (Note: ‘Delete Version’ can delete over multiple tracks).
This might work best when you select a single track in which there are selections but it will work for multiple tracks if ALL the relevant tracks are selected (and this last part is very important otherwise you risk copying things where you may not want to copy them!).
To show the track(s) where there are event selections you can use the visibility agent ‘Show tracks with selected events’ (Inspector/Vsibility), and you can use Preferences / Editing / ‘Track selection follows event selection’ to automatically select tracks when there are selected events on the track.
If you are working with event selections on multiple tracks I’d recommend you use Preferences / Editing / ‘Track selection follows event selection’ since this helps you for this whole process and you can step through multiple event selections on multiple tracks using the ‘N’ and ‘B’ keys.
(Of course, you can put a key command on the above macro).
To the OP
Yes you can but in a roundabout way… today it’s a multi step process.
Disclaimer,I may be mis-remembering stuff and am not in front of Nuendo.
Here goes.
1 Edit mode on
2 Using PLE you can find and “tag” (using prepend name) all your desiered events.
3 Another PLE will instead select (among the tagged files) the one that is at the cursor. Now you can listen to that event
4 PLE un-tag the selected event at the cursor (after listening to it).
Run 3-4 until happiness and nirvana happens.
ErikG Thanks. I’ve just tried your solution: it works. A bit tedious, but when really in need, I do not see any better way to go.
Let me detail a bit for those interested in the procedure:
I tried with both full Events and Regions (in case they would behave differently).
Entered a search Event name in the filter section (top), and entered an Append Name in the Transform section (bottom) (to add a -zz tag at the end of the Event name).
-
First pass, choose Transform as a function at the bottom. All occurences of the event had their name changed. Actually not their name (File name), but the name in the Description field of the Inspector (which is cleverer as it does not change the name of the soundfile on disk). That worked for both the Events and the Regions I had previously created and renamed individually. All where appended with the -zz tag.
-
Second pass: Initialize the PLE. Then choose the Select Function at the bottom.
In the filter field (top) create a search line for the name: -zz. Apply.
I previously created a macro (in the keyboard shortcuts window) to place the cursor at the beginning of the selection.
All Occurences will be selected and cursor will go to the first one. -
Listen and remove the (-zz) tag. Go to the next occurence with a second search, and so on…
You can also colorize the selections as suggested by stingray. But there is no way to search for colours so it may not be that useful.
Many thanks all for your help and solutions!
stingray, Thanks also.
By mistake I had not read your answer before my last post. I’ll look into what you propose, though it seems to be a bit more complex than the solution provided by ErikG.
Regions: yes they’re Regions as defined in the Sample Editor or simply in the Project (Range as Region command). I have large libraries of sounds (field recordings), and/or transfers from various media, some with very long takes (tapes, DATs etc). Regions are then used to locate and name events and sound objects of interest, and descriptions of the contents of the sound files when working on projects.
Got it.
Once you’ve made the macro, the operation is simple. All you do is select the events in the project window and then execute the macro to show only the selected events. The idea is that you use the new track version to navigate. You could make another macro to step through/play the events.
But Erik’s solution works fine and you could probably set that up to audition the events with just a single PLE preset (using a nested PLE preset in a macro).
stingray, thanks. I am going to try this today.
So here is what I manged to do with the PLE and a macro:
0. make sure everything is deselected (tracks, events)
- PLE top/filter field: Search for a name containing “xname”
- PLE bottom, Function = Transform
Action: Set color, Set to = Color 5
Events containing the name “xname” are colorized on their tracks
- PLE bottom, Function = Select
Action: activates the following macro commands:
- Edit - Select Event
- Edit - Copy
- Add Track - Audio —> Window pops up: choose the type of track (mono, stereo…)
- Edit - Paste at origin
- Transport - Locate selection
So I end up with new tracks, with the Events copied at the right place on the timeline. As you wrote earlier, events are easy to find, and the new color also makes them easier to find on the original tracks amongst many other events.
Some weird things:
- the Track selection follows event selection command does not work here. It just toggles the Preferences, but does not actually select the Track. It does work though when I click on an event in the timeline…
- since the tracks are not selected, they cannot be duplicated. By the way I did not find a TrackVersions - New Version command. But it works with new tracks. Of the new created tracks, one has a generic Audio x name and the other, the same name as one of the originals. Don’t know why.
There are now two ways to get to find an event on the timeline. But wouldn’t it be nice if in the Pool, instead of having a Use count of “16” for an event (no count for Regions), there was a context menu with locations of these uses. That would be very useful when you create a composite sound out of several/many layers, and mostly when these sounds are not musical instruments easy to identify.
Sorry for the long post. There may be other things to add, but for now: Many thanks to you guys.
You may have misunderstood. Yes, it’s entirely meant to work like that. The Key Command activates the Preference. That is what it’s meant to do. But that is not at all what I was suggesting in my post above. To achieve what I was suggesting you simply activate this preference manually in Preferences… and that’s all. With this option active, selecting any event in the event display will also automatically activate its corresponding track. Please see the manual for clarification on this.
It’s definitely there in the key commands (see screenshot).
Yes, I know and use it sometimes. But here, as I wrote, it just does not work. If I select an event by clicking in the timeline, the track(s) will also be selected. When done through the macro, it does not work. That’s curious. A bug maybe.
I understand we use different Nuendo versions. I use 6 or 5.56. These commands don’t exist there unfortunately. But that’s ok since there is a way to do the search and selection anyways.