Nuendo 8 - The new standard, essential feature is missing

An open Letter to The Steinberg Developement Team:

Congratulations on the new release of Nuendo 8.

Nuendo 8 - the new standard in audio to picture work. What a great title!
The new version of Nuendo for sure has a lot of new and exciting features and I have looked at them in both awe and excitement. There is, however, still the essential feature of “field recorder workflow” missing.

By “Field recorder workflow” I mean the process of handling audio with metadata form recording devices from companies such as Sound Devices, Zaxcom and now Zoom (with the new F-series recorders), and syncing location audio with the video from the editor. The editor in this case, only needs to edit video-material with the on location mix - the extra tracks of field audio will be able to sync up in the daw, leaving you, as the sound editor, to take care of the rest.

It is both a smart, time-saving and now an essential feature of a professional post production workflow for both film and tv. It has been a stable feature in Avid Pro Tools for years now and it is the only feature, that forces Nuendo users like myself in tv and film, to have a copy of Pro Tools in the background of my Nuendo-session.

Calling your new Nuendo version the standard in audio to picture work, is somewhat bothersome, when you are lacking an essential feature, that your main competitor (Avid) has (and has had for years). What is even more bothersome is, that I as a user of Nuendo and an audio professional, have to explain to video-editors, that I need their sessions with all audio tracks exported into AAF/OMF, when my competitors (Pro Tools users) can have it another and better way. Also the fact that I need Pro Tools (or other expensive 3rd party software) is just tiring.

I chose Nuendo over Pro Tools due to the many great and superior features and the workflow. Nuendo just need the above, to make it the most complete audio post production software. I cannot be the only professional Nuendo user needing this in my workflow.

For reference on how this feature works in pro tools, see this video:

The above is a recap of a previous post I made in the Nuendo 7 forum.

Best Regards

  • Mads Stagis

+1

Steinberg for some reason does not really listen to the opinion of users. Now I’m downloading the N8 and I’m afraid to detect a “progressive” modification of some of my usual functions … As it was not once since Nuendo-4x :frowning:

Timo said many times here on this forum that the “field recorder workflow” will not make it into the initial release of Nuendo 8, but it’s something of high priority on their list after the release.

“Cue sends are on our list for the Nuendo 8.x lifecycle. Field Recording import is also one of the next priorities.” - said Timo.

I feel your pain that there’s a big new paid upgrade and the one reallyannoying thing is not included. But I think Steinberg heard you in that regard and it’s coming. At least you know that :slight_smile: Whereas many small features I’d like to see were left unmentioned. I guess I’ll have to lobby some more for them.

+1
But also EDL conformation and a plugin like pluraleyes who compare waveform.
The PT tutorial involves a sync track from the field recorder. But I often need to conform from the camera’s test track. Or from the TC.

There is no need to use PT Field recorder workflow, you can choose to use another third party application if you want to, or you can choose to do the “dirty” DIY version where files are replaced based on filename and TC only (not perfect and has specific demands of the editor and export).

We have both PTHD and Titan, and we choose Titan 100% of the time, even though it is a bit old school and clunky, it works very well. In fact where PT fails Titan can manage…

Saying that, yes having a full solution within Nuendo itself not having to rely on third party programs would be very nice and a very welcome addition!

Titan is not cross platform and quite expensive as well.
Also, how do you export from Titan to Nuendo?

I would really want a Nuendo solution.

But AT LEAST, we should be able to display field recorder track names.

Hi all,

what Robin said. I would repeat myself, but Field Recorder Workflow is on the list
and we know about the priority. However, the team doing things like these needs to be
available and that will only be the case sometime after the Nuendo 8 release.

Something that will come for free to Nuendo 8 is a new Speech Alignment tool.
Planned for early autumn.

Thanks,
Timo

+1

This is the type of feature that would have made it an easy upgrade for me.

Yes of course I agree.

Is Titan mac only? As I am a mac user I have actually not realised that.
Titan exports as PT session files or as AES31 (.adl) project files. Nuendo imports AES31 from Titan just fine.

Yes to be able to see the track name is a seriously missing feature.
We work around this, we split all location sound using wave agent and then use a script to copy the data from the track name and paste it in the notes so Nuendo can display it. Works quite well but requires a extra processing round on all location sound that takes a little time to do.
Far from a perfect solution but it does give us what we need.

Sometimes PT field recorder guide track function can save from asking repeatedly proper Edl to edit departments.
Most of the time edl are crappy because they don’t know the first thing about maudio metadata management (and don’t care)
I regularly end up asking for NLE offline project to generate proper edl myself.
Sometimes ok with just excel and text wrangler but what a waste of time and energy just to get a proper edl…
Then and only titan is in fact one of the best tool there is.
So in the end, yes an initial conformation is gonna be useful in Nuendo.
Given the future post metadata workflow coming up and the already existing (and very nice) reconform tool, I’m not worried.

Except I’ve never been able to import any adl file on Mac.
Have to gon on a pc to import .adl files in Nuendo.
On a Mac it simply won’t select the file as the extension is not recognized…
Erik ? What is your trick ?! :wink:)

Writing a script that can do what you describe is beyond my abilities and those of most Nuendo users I guess.
Would you share your workaround?

Haha, it’s beyond my skills as well, but fortunately I have a co-worker who loves to figure out this stuff.
I’m not good at advanced scripting, but he is.

split to mono and track name to notes:

We do this for two reasons. The main one is that there are to many hurdles in Nuendo when using poly wav files that needs splitting in Nuendo. The other is that as long as it’s all split using wave agent (only solution we have found that does this properly) we can use a script using http://bwfmetaedit.sourceforge.net.
This pulls data from the track name and pushes into the notes field.

I will see if my co-worker could spend the time to describe how it is done. But I am afraid that you may need to have someone to help you to do this. It’s not like there is a GUI front end to handle the full process. He is currently on vacation so don’t expect it any time soon.

Yes there IS a little trick…

Titan as default will keep the .edl extension. And that stops it from being recognised by Nuendo as a AES31 file.
There are two very simple solutions to this.
In Titan when naming the export, change the extension to .adl/.ADL , or just rename it in the finder (I have to do this using CMD-I to get info, unlock and then change it, For some reason it doesn’t work for me doing it straight in the finder every time).

Then you will get a AES31 file that imports just fine in Nuendo. On a mac no less :slight_smile:

Bloody hell !
I was doing exactly that except I used to change the extension in the finder right away.
I’ll try it via CMD-I
Thanks a lot Erik :wink:
(Never worked for me when renaming in .adl right in Titan, for some reason…)

Whenever I remember to rename the extension in Titan it always works here. I use it for every delivery we get. Multiple TV series and features so I know it works.

If you happen to own EdiLoad (we do) then I suggest you clean th Audio EDL before running it in Titan.
First I sort on roll or clip and and remove all non dialog events (it makes it easier to see if any files where not found in the report afterwards) and then run the clean list (CMD/SHIFT/C), this removes all stereo duplicates etc so the list becomes a lot neater and so does the conform.


In Titan I can only get decent results when having it set to calculate tracks (the top most choice in the drop down) the others can create horrendous results at times.

Good luck Titanizing :slight_smile:

Well, the worst part is that I remember using Titan for generating adl on mac with no problem under Nuendo 4.
And yet again, it was another OS, so…
But I’m gonna dig that one out a little bit more. I have to say that I import from a virtual machine, save and reopen on mac, never fails. Too lazy to find the correct trick, probably.

And yes, EDILoad is worth every cent it costs, we use it also when things don’t pan out really great from the beginning.
It’s just that sometimes, the dl we receive are so messy that you have to go back to NLE.
Only on short or some low budget feature films, series have bullet-proof workflows tailored from the beginning :wink:
Thanks again, anyway !

No worries.
I’m fortunate anough that most deliverables from picture editors I get are made using Avid MC. Although I have no love for Avid as such, it is still the only system that exports edls reliably imo.
And most of the stuff I work on are internal (we are part of a production company) and our video dept is prett darn good. Saying that, we just employed three new assistant editors so I guess I may see some more issues for a while before they get into it.

Good to know Wave Agent can do this. It does a lot of nifty conversions so it is easy to gloss over it’s capability. If people don’t have it, the app is free and available from the Sound Devices website.

http://www.sounddevices.com/support/downloads

Just checked the site, the Windows download section, and there is a GUI that is downloadable. It is shown as a link right above the commandline app. I assume it is much like a UNIX style GUI that is really a primitive front end for the commandline app.

A reason to get on this sooner than later is Sound Devices, within the past year has made it incredibly easy to add Metadata to Scenes, Takes and Tracks. Mixers and people operating out of bags can now add metadata from their iPhones and iPads. The adoption of this is picking up speed, so people getting these files or editors and producers will want to see this stuff carried along through the production process. If you cannot handle it, then it could mean not getting a call for a job in the future…

I hope Steinberg does the right thing, and slides in this needed ability to do Kung Fu on polywave files and such from sound mixers, just like they did with the Dolby ATMOS functionality that just appeared in a maintenance release. It was classy and garnered a lot of karma with users. Seen people looking at the Nuendo platform that were blown away by the notion that ATMOS was just in Nuendo. Let’s see Steinberg do a similar move with importing polywave files with proper metadata interpretation. It would be the right thing to do and should be done soon, in my view. You will make some of your key users into renewed evangelists for the application. It would be a much easier sell to pros, if this feature was present and it really worked.

I cannot remember how many years ago I asked Phillipe Goutier, the creator of Wavelab and Timo Wildenhain if moving the information to the filename was possible in Wavelab. (It is not)
The sad thing is that sub 100 dollar shareware programs like Twistedwave or Snapper can display that data, so it cannot exactly be rocket science that is impossible to implement. Yet it would make everyone’s life so much easier.