Looking for info and advice for a project I brought into Nuendo as an AAF from Premiere 2025.
I have about 10 dialog tracks, all of which comprise of many, many audio events . Each track is from a single interview session though. Pretty standard. I want to use SL to Voice De Noise and reduce production noise etc.
When I open each Nuendo audio event in SL via the ARA Extension, I get the ability to process each event. OK so far. But I notice that for each event I open I get a separate ‘Tab’ in SL. These Tabs are going to build up! I guess SL doesn’t get applied like a Plug In process, where each event is a separate instance of SL. I think each event actually becomes a separate “Layer” in one instance of SL (?). Is this going to be an issue as the project progresses? Should I be using “Make Extension Permanent” as I go? Then it seems I can’t make adjustments later when I inevitably have to.
I DO see I can add the SL extension to an entire track of audio events ( again, all one interview). Are all events in track meant to be affected by that Track Extension? In which case how do I adjust the overall Track settings? When I tried it, I just got dozens of Event Tabs in SL and each one seemed to have individual adjustments.
Not working quite like I imagined … but I want to learn!
OK I’ve clarified for myself how I think applying ARA SL 11 to an entire Nuendo Track works.
It doesn’t apply a single SL Process to all events on the Nuendo track. It simply adds all events to SL ready for processing. As far as I can tell I still have to apply a SL process to each Neuendo event individually? Even if they all need the same treatment, and I have saved a SL Preset I can’t find a way to apply the preset to all the clips at once.
It is a few clips on a single Nuendo track. I applied the SL Extension to the track ( box on the left) . If I set the SL/Clip Menu to “Group by Format” I can at least see all the clips in SL. However if I apply a process ( -30dB Gain reduction in this example ) only the first clip has the result applied ( see the arrow, and faint data trace ). This happens even if I have done a Time Select across all the events in SL, or selected all the Events in Nuendo.
I can subsequently select each event in Nuendo and apply the SL process one-by-one … but if the Track is an edited Dialog track it could easily have hundreds of segments! And the project could have dozens of Dialog tracks!
Sorry if I’m thinking about this incorrectly ( I hope so… ) but I don’t see how this could work efficiently in a post production sense, other than having to touch every clip individually.
If I apply the SL Extension to individual clips ( forgoing adding it to a track ) , and set the SL Clip Menu to “No Grouping”, then I only see Nuendo events one at a time in SL. I select the Nuendo Event, and it pops up in SL. It makes more sense to my lizard brain than when the Grouping option is activated and all the events in Nuendo with the extension are visible. That said, each event is a separate Tab in SL. As a project progresses, if there’s ever thousands of these open, will my computer complain?
BTW, right-clicking on a Nuendo event processed in SL and “Making the Extension Permanent” will finalize ALL the open tabs./events. ( in my testing). I kind of expected it to just operate on the one event where I selected the command.
ARA can sometimes be shakey ground and the standalone version of SL would handle this better, afaik.
Then you could open all the clips so that they get arranged ”under one tab” in one go, and then execute your processes.
Or you could batch process all of the clips overnight, with a modules chain if you’d like.
You raise a valid work around which I have explored a bit… actually pre-processing with SL all location/production audio and adding the cleaned tracks back to the original video. Then the editors can use the pre-cleaned audio to edit, and it will filter down through a standard post production/mixing workflow. Kind of pre -post production. BUT… outside of a small production I think we’d have a hell of time selling the idea! It works BTW … I have done it on a couple of 5 min corporate pieces where I was very close ( working wise ) to the editors.
I’ve also experimented with selecting all the events on a Nuendo track and using “Render In Place” to create a single event to load into SL. However the loss of handles, fades etc is a bit drastic.
You actually might be spot on about the limitations of ARA as a means to integrate SL into a tool such as Nuendo for the purposes of post production. Clearly ARA just presents SL with audio data from one file/segment at a time so processing a whole track of segments, ( from different files perhaps ) is hard or impossible. In addition some processes in SL dont lend themselves to being applied to a whole track. For instance "deleting "a section of audio doesn’t happen to a whole Track!
However I would still like to be able to apply the SL Voice-dereverb/ Voice denoise and so on, to a track in one go. Perhaps there’s world where SL could present these processes as Plug Ins.? Given they only have one parameter (Amount) they would be very usable across a Track or Bus, even if the output had to rendered for playback.
Gonna flip over to the Nuendo forum to see what the team there thinks!
Ok, so I tried in Nuendo 14 to open 15 Parts on one Audio Track in Spectralayers 11 (ARA extension). It was a song where the vocal Track has 15 events; one Part for each phrase in the song, split up to get rid of noise in the pauses between the phrases.
I selected all of the 15 Parts, right clicked one of them and chose Extensions>Spectralayers.
Then in Spectralayers, on a separate monitor, all of the Parts opened up ‘under one tab’ as 15 layers.
I then made a Modules Chain consisting of the Voice Dereverb and the VST3 modules, the latter loaded with Zynaptiq’s Balance VST3 plugin.
Then I ran the Modules Chain on each of the 15 layers - it’s a pity one can’t select several layers and process with the Modules chain (or any other module for that matter). So I selected a layer and hit Apply in the Modules Chain - one at a time - and repeated it 14 times.
After that I activated the Nuendo window on the other screen and chose “Make extension permanent” (via right clicking and Extensions, which I have a shorthand for).
All 15 Parts got changed in one go.
No problem.
This time ARA worked, but too many times (in Cubase 13 & 14) when Spectralayers has done its magic the host (Cubase) will not receive the changes or update the selected Parts on that (Make extensions permanent) commando. And the Extension (Spectralayers) will not leave or close. It could be a haphazard game…
I’m not sure if the problem lies in Spectralayers or in the host but the ARA communication is fawlty sometimes.
Now, running the Modules Chain on 15 layers and select them manually is doable but I understand that it’s not if you have 100-200 clips/Parts/layers to process.
A way to select multiple layers in SL (and a robust ARA handling between the host and SL) would definitely help.
But at least I could make the Extension permanent for multiple Parts (in Nuendo) in one go, FWIW.
Yes I get this too. But I just updated to Nuendo 14 and noticed a difference from V13 immediately which makes the whole thing more usable for me!
It is simply that when the extension is showing “Clips/Grouped by Format” and you can see all the spectragrams in row in SL , selecting the Event in the Nuendo timeline automatically selects the layer in the SL! This doesn’t happen in V13 on my computer ( Mac) and it got very confusing! Unfortunately selecting the layer in SL doesn’t select the event in Nuendo which would keep things very clear. But at least its more intuitive now.
I agree it would be a huge step to be able to select a bunch of layers and apply a module chain to them. But we’d need confidence that a large selection would bork the system… or worse the project! ( I’ve seen the unintentional application of processing to a large number of clips in an NLE almost destroy a whole project. It was very hard to resurrect!)
It doesn’t solve how to use SL on a large number of consecutive clips without making the processing permanent as you go. and this is a showstopper for post production in video. A suggestion in the Nuendo forum was for SL to be offered as a suite, which had standalone, ARA and plug in versions ( where applicable). Hopefully the option to have some modules available as insert effects ( ie VST 3 probably… which would require rendering for playback! ) would open up the use of SL technology in a complex project environment.
I think you actually can use SL on a large number of clips - consecutive or nor - without ‘making permanent’, like you can with other ARA extensions, like Melodyne and others.
One problem is that having open ARA extensions feels rather unsafe, since the communications through that protocol seem not very robust - the host can crash, or the changes made in the extension won’t feed back/report to the host - which I suspect mostly lies on the host, regarding there has apparently been some changes (for the better) between Nuendo 13 and 14, like you say.
The other problem would be that with open SL ARA extensions the Nuendo .npr files quickly would become gigantic since the SL layers in open ARA Parts are parts of the .npr file.
So yeah, there are some issues for Steinberg to work out with regards to the ARA handling, and I believe they are mostly at host level.
When it comes to using VST3 plugins for Direct Offline Processing in Cubendo you have a similar choice between making them permanent or not. But if you choose ‘not to’ the .npr file won’t grow gigantic like with SL as ARA.
It will only lay an accumulated burden on the CPU (that SL as ARA doesn’t in an open and processed Part since every process in SL is offline). Which may be fine.
So those are the choices between workflows, as I see it. I don’t do any video/film post, only music production (and remastering) though (I had to look up “NLE” ).
Having some SL modules as separate VST3 plugins would be really great, that would make some of the choices above easier and more convenient; there are functions in there that I think are better than many other plugins I’ve seen. Voice Denoise, Voice Dereverb and Dereverb are a few.
BUT… outside of a small production I think we’d have a hell of time selling the idea! It works BTW … I have done it on a couple of 5 min corporate pieces where I was very close ( working wise ) to the editors.
).