PT just teased upcoming features including transcription. It looks amazing for post. Steinberg should copy it asap.
Hate to sound repetitive, but since I already have to pay for Pro Tools just to get functioning AAF import I might as well use it for editing if it then also provides this functionality, and after I’m done with that it gets even harder to argue for mixing in Nuendo. See where I’m going with this?.. If this isn’t “the basics” for a post DAW already then it will be in like 5 months time.
No client of mine who knows I can do this in PT will accept me asking for alts from a video editor just because it’s tedious or cumbersome to do the search in Nuendo… since they expect me to be using PT to begin with (which I’m not telling them I’m not using).
That sounds natural—but things are definitely getting weirder on the AI front.
We just tested the new Automix feature in the DaVinci Resolve 20 beta, and the results were honestly jaw-dropping. It uses AI to dynamically balance dialogue, music, and effects in real time—something you’d normally expect only from an experienced post-production mixer. It’s not just a gimmick; it feels like a serious shift in how we’ll approach mixes.
Both Pro Tools and DaVinci Resolve rely on OpenAI’s Whisper for transcription, and it’s impressively accurate—not just in American English, but also in Hindi, which is a huge plus for multilingual projects.
What really caught me off guard, though, was Steinberg’s approach in Nuendo 14. Even though it uses its own proprietary transcription model, it’s remarkably good at clean dialogue extraction and speaker segmentation—at least in American English. However, the absence of support for Hindi and other South Asian languages makes it pretty much unusable for our workflows.
Also, I don’t think adding a proper search engine for transcripts should be difficult—Avid has already demonstrated that cleanly in Pro Tools at NAB.
Strange times indeed. Still reeling from the Automix shock.
The weirdest part? It seemed to generate plugins on the fly—encapsulating multiple algorithms and presenting them through a plain, minimalist interface.
But here’s the kicker: these plugins don’t actually exist. They’re virtual constructs, built dynamically by the AI in response to the mix.
+1 to everybody saying that there needs to be more video export options in Nuendo. Having to compress all the video files I export from Nuendo is such a workflow killer. Coming from Logic Pro, I got very used to being able to export smaller video files with smaller audio formats.
I don’t need a full quality video export every time I send a revision to someone.
Thanks for sharing your content! Good overview of new features.
It is a big step for da vinci but i am not completely convinced in terms of sound quality yet. It is however a grest altrtnative if ADR is not an option and when the project is low budget.
Voice match sounded very uncanny to me, i will checkbit out myself next week and report.
The ADR feature is excellent—it was widely used in the broadcast industry and had become something of a standard even before Blackmagic acquired Fairlight ESP (Electric Sound and Picture). If I’m not mistaken, the original Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) cost around £37,000 when it was first released.
Fairlight technology was famously used by artists like Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, and Duran Duran, playing a key role in shaping the sound of electronic and pop music in the 1980s to early 2000.
We were originally hoping for a full Fairlight implementation—though it does come with a basic sampler, which feels more like a nod than a resurrection. Still, the direction Blackmagic is taking with AI integration is intriguing and worth watching.
For our workflow, it nicely complements Nuendo—adding a legacy-rich dimension to a modern, flexible setup.
Or maybe vice-versa.
Great to hear it works well for you!
I’m pretty familiar with fairlight and know its background. The adr functionality is nice but i’m talking specifically the new AI tools.
They are nice but need more time and so i’m not as impressed as you and your colleagues are (it is not INSANE new tech to me at least).
But this thread has already gone wildly off topic (with N14).
Yeah, i see this often too. I wrote somewhere that we need some sort of detailed error log file for nuendo.
Clip name, track name, time code start, time code end just for start.
I am sure steiberg team has that kind of tool for troubleshoting
Side note off topic: BTW I watched a couple of your DaVinci videos recently and I learned a few new tricks, thank you. Your videos in general have been getting better over time, congrats, and please let Anagha know she is a very good host/narrator.
And may I suggest that when you cover a feature in Nuendo that is also in Cubase, that you at least mention it, and note it in your description and/or titles, that might bring in some more search traffic too. (Cubase users could benefit from some of your Nuendo workflows that overlap.)
Anyway, I think your approach of creating content that integrates various tools you use like Nuendo plus SpectraLayers or WaveLab, etc., on your actual projects, is a good one, keep the content going!
I get a few warnings like these with every AAF the editors send me (either from Premiere or Resolve), but they never translate to real problems, though.
I just close the warnings, check the import and its fine.
Since we always follow the same procedure, I’ve learned to safely ignore it.
I’m sorry to ask but… do your cases mean real problems?
It’s a totally valid question. I’ve run into two categories of problems so far:
1: If a sequence contains mixed sample rates the import may actually sample rate convert on-the-fly. I see the error message but if I’m pressed for time there’s a tiny risk I miss it. Say you have a piece of dialog from a separate source ingested by the editor that is now playing back wrong. I might not even hear that but they will, and they will wonder why you decided to pitch shift dialog. I ran into this once and it was embarrassing.
There are three solutions to this specific problem; a) tell the editor to re-export everything correctly (not gonna happen), b) go through the timeline and compare either dialog “to itself” and hope to find a discrepancy, or compare the dialog to the rough-mixdown the editor did in their edit. “b” isn’t viable when you have a ton of production audio over 40+ minutes of content with a tight turnaround. c) use Pro Tools.
Zoom levels are a bit off, but you can see how stuff is just missing on import in Nuendo. Again, c) use Pro Tools.… $$$$$
I think this is one of those things where although we can argue back and forth about different workflows, like using clip-gain, this isn’t really that debatable. You can use clip gain but only if you have clips to work on in the first place. The core of post-production is getting audio from the edit so we have something to work on. If we can’t go back to the source and complain that editors aren’t doing it right, and if we can’t tell Avid what to do (or Adobe or whoever), then all we’re left with is either pay for not just Nuendo but also some other software (like Pro Tools) or Steinberg “loosens” AAF import procedures to get it to par with the main competition.
Things aren’t getting better financially in our industry so at some point I just have to ask myself it makes sense to pay for both Nuendo and Pro Tools just so I’m able to work.
The specification of the AAF protocol does not allow mixed sample rates .
When exporting from an Avid, you get a warning that mixed sample rates are not allowed.
You can however ignore that message and continue.
Dunno if it is still like that though …
I longed for a native Atmos-compatible reverb for Nuendo to rival Exponential Audio’s aging Stratus3D. That wait is over. iZotope’s new Equinox perfectly matches Stratus and Symphony 1 to 1 fully supporting all my user presets. It also includes AI-driven dynamic adaptive unmasking with tone balancing, akin to Waves CurveEQ.
