Introduction

Welcome to Nuendo 5 Power! This book will help you get the most out of your Nuendo DAW. Whether you are producing audio for picture, making music, or doing sound design for games, this book will provide you with insights and tips that will help make your job as an audio professional more efficient, creative, and rewarding.

Nuendo Is the Professional’s Choice

Nuendo is a professional piece of software, designed to provide you with the features and workflows professionals have been asking for in a DAW. Because there are so many variations on the type of work performed in modern audio production, Nuendo has many customized feature sets to cater to various production methods. This level of customization comes with a cost: complexity.

The level of complexity found in Nuendo can make it a daunting task to grasp the whole program all at once. This book will take you through Nuendo’s features step by step in the context of both sound-design and music-production workflows, bringing to light all the possibilities that will help you get the work done faster and better. Whether you are recording a full rhythm section live in the studio, exporting 1,500 dialog clips for the next big first-person-shooter game, or mixing a feature film on the dub stage, Nuendo has the tools to make the experience successful, efficient, and rewarding.

Scope of Material

This book is not a substitute for Steinberg’s documentation, which takes the form of several PDF files covering different areas of the software. The focus of this book is not to describe each and every feature of the software, but rather to explore how to use these features in a real-world manner using examples of common and not-so-common tasks in audio engineering.

Much of the graphical user interface (GUI) is outlined in the beginning in a specific way that is different from the manuals. The manuals spread out much of this information, and I wanted to bring it all together in one place, at least for the basic and most often used windows.

Because Nuendo is intended primarily for post-production, live recording, and broadcast work, tools for music composition will not be covered in as much depth as recording, editing, and mixing of music will be. This is not to say that music production will be ignored, but the book will focus on the audio recording and performance capturing of musicians in a studio setting. For example, the Score is an add-on part of Nuendo that is contained in the NEK package for music production. Although the Score is a powerful and important tool for composition, it will not be covered in depth in this book.

MIDI, VSTis, looping, pitch altering, and quantization are all considered music tools but are equally at home in the sound-design and post-production worlds. This book will apply those tools to both types of audio production, since that is what makes Nuendo such great software—its flexibility and deeply professional feature set.

Mixing is covered in two main areas: stereo and surround. The stereo information is based more on music mixing, and the surround information is centered on film and video post-production.

How This Book Is Organized

I’ve organized this book into four parts. In each section, I will use examples from both music and post-production workflows to explore Nuendo’s features from a real-world perspective. There will be step-by-step instructions for accomplishing various tasks, such as editing multitrack drums or setting up Nuendo as a stem recorder.

I will provide tips and tricks to help speed up your workflow, including custom key commands and macros designed by many experienced Nuendo users, such as myself and others who beta-test for Steinberg. You’ll get inside information from those who help design and test the software itself.

There will be sidebars to help Avid Pro Tools users migrate to Nuendo by matching various functions and commands from this popular DAW. I’ll discuss other third-party software and hardware, such as Waves plug-ins and Euphonix control surfaces, as they relate to the operation of Nuendo.

What You Will Learn in This Book

In this book, you will learn how to set up Nuendo in various environments, starting with a mobile laptop system and going all the way up to a complete dubbing theater with multiple Nuendo systems integrated together.

You will learn how to record audio and MIDI data in Nuendo. This can be as simple as one voiceover channel with multiple takes and comping, or as complex as a full orchestral scoring session to picture, and anything in between.

You will learn how to edit audio and MIDI data in Nuendo. This includes anything from simple trimming of audio events to multitrack quantization of drums. Editing in this book includes the various forms of offline processing, such as time stretching, pitch shifting and correction, batch processing, and more.

You will learn how to mix audio down into every conceivable delivery format available, from mono MP3 up to 8-channel surround sound at 96 kHz. Nuendo was built from the ground up as a multimedia audio-production tool and has extensive multichannel routing and mixing capabilities.

Even if you are mixing stereo music, the fully delay-compensated mix engine allows for console-style mixing techniques and tricks used by today’s top mix engineers. Parallel processing, multibus, and external summing options are just a few of the possibilities in music mixing.

Conclusion

The in-depth coverage of features and how they are applied in the real world will lead you to a more efficient workflow with Nuendo and offer you a path to find new and even more innovative ways of using the software. The feature set is so deep and versatile that each individual can customize the way Nuendo works to match his or her specific needs.

I hope you share your ways of working with other users in the community so that we may all learn a little bit more each day. With such a complex piece of software, the possibilities are virtually limitless in the ways you can use Nuendo to create dynamic and creatively moving pieces of aural art. To share your experience with Nuendo and see how others do the same, please visit some of these online communities and join in the conversation.

www.steinberg.net/forum. This is Steinberg’s own forum for all of their products.

www.cubendo.com. This is a new forum for users of Cubase and Nuendo. Bugs are tracked here.

www.gearslutz.com. This forum contains all sorts of topics beyond Nuendo, but is a place where just about anything in audio is discussed.