Learning Nuendo

    This week was a bit more exciting, as I got to get into the weeks of Nuendo! Its a lesser known DAW, but is better known by the name of its little brother, Cubase. Nuendo is the same as Cubase but with many post-production and sound design features added on to it, and let me tell you they are REALLY nice. While I did a little bit of basic sound design, I spent a lot of this week setting up a project file. Similar to Pro Tools, Nuendo offers markers. However, Nuendos work much differently. Nuendo allows you to add up to 32 separate marker tracks that can be toggled, and include 2 types: location and cycle. Location markers allow you to mark, well, locations. But cycle markers allow you to designate an area for a single sound, name it, and any design and layering in that spot on the timeline will be exported as its own file with the designated name. Essentially meaning, as long as you surround each sound effect in a cycle marker and name them, you can batch export every sound in a project separately with correct naming and time with just one button. And with separate marker tracks, you can even set up a different track for each character! This means that I can make a folder for each character in the game, each with its own locator and cycle markers, allowing me to work with every character and sound cleanly within the same session, and export as little or as much as I need with only a few button clicks,  all of which are automatically named to the correct file! You can even add metadata tags within the cycle markers that will be added to the exported file. All this to say, the organization potential of Nuendo is insane, you can work with insanely large and non-linear projects with ease. I currently have a folder for each character, chapter, and game wide sounds, each with locator markers to separate the types of sounds per character. Each marker track has a submenu that can be opened that shows all locator and cycle markers, and allows you to quickly jump to and zoom into a location, no matter how far down the timeline it is. To add to it, Nuendo allows you to render entire effects chains to a clip rather than a track, in a non-destructive way. That means I can process each sound individually, and save the track for global edits. But unlike pro-tools, I dont need to bake the edits into the clip, I can always go back and edit the chain on the effect or simply get rid of it if I want. And last but not least, the export in Nuendo has a built in limiter and normalizer. I can set a target LUFS and true peak, and every clip exported will match the target volume on export, making for easy uniform volume editing across an entire project. All this to say, I am very excited to work within this DAW more over the next few weeks!