I probably did not express myself clearly enough. I didn’t mean to get rid of the timeline. Of course you need a timeline for the individual sound effects then. What I was talking about is more a meta-layer, a management-layer where you can manage your multitude of project files and search for markers, jump directly into a project to a specific sound effect and so on. But on the level of individual sound of course go back to a timeline paradigm.
What I meant is there are 2 fundamentally different types of work.
- People who work on movies and shows, who can reference the video material and have one project where they mix everything together.
- People who work on individual sound effects. They are suppliers of sound effects for (1). They don’t adhere to the movie as reference, they work on individual little pieces. They create sound effects for the sake of it and don’t have a frame of reference.
My question is now: how do you organize when you’re doing work in category (2). Nuendo and other DAWs are good at keeping one big session open and manage memory and resources, so when you mix and edit a movie, you’re set. But I’ve seen people edit 1 sound effect per project file. So they would end up with 100 different project files for their game project. How do you manage that when you have to jump back and forth between different sounds, copy some elements of one sound to the other, trying to keep everything consistent. Then you have to do a change across dozens of them because of some project changes (happens often in games, at least for me). You have to open up 100 projects and change settings, naming conventions, sound character.
DAWs are not great at juggling dozens of project files simultaneously. Nuendo kind of copes with that in that it has only one active project and you can switch windows and copy stuff. But quickly listening in for reference is not possible, you need to activate and that is an overhead. It’s not practical doing this constantly. Within one project, DAWs do great work. But when managing dozens of project, keeping them consistent, batch-renaming markers cross-project to keep everything conform, they don’t work. Lot of manual work. So what’s the solution? That’s my question.
Do you put everything in one project then? Still you cannot efficiently manage and batch-rename or even search for markers.
So yes, in your TV drama you have 100-300 tracks. All in a linear fashion, so it’s kind of manageable to keep the overview as you always have the TV show as reference. You can jump to a specific time, part or scene.
When you create 100 sound effects plus variations for a game, you don’t have this reference. Building those sound effects that are comprised of multiple individual sounds themselves in one project file is hard to manage. In order to batch export them you’d need to place them in different parts of the timeline so each sound effect has its exclusive part in the timeline (so you don’t have to manage solo and mute individually per export).
Especially in games, where you create a bunch of effects only to find half of them need re-editing because they sound good but in the game don’t feel that great. There’s a lot of iteration going on, lots of back and forth, trying, mixing in the game engine, adjusting settings. So overview and quick turnaround are key. And for this, being able to quickly jump to a specific effect, manipulating it, searching and exporting a bunch of them back into the game is important. Currently, a lot of this happens manually.
I just find this way of working tedious. I’m longing for some means of better organizing, jumping back and forth projects quicker, renaming, searching, finding. Could I explain more what I mean?