Review Steinberg Nuendo 4

What shape is your business in? Has it traced the arc of the wider economy and spiraled down? Or have you taken these unsteady times as an opportunity to develop new relationships with clients who may not have considered working with you in the past? If you're an audio post pro working out of a project studio, you may feel that you have little in common with major industry players. If so, you might be surprised to find that some of the most well-known mix-to-pic engineers in the industry are taking advantage of relatively inexpensive tools (such as Steinberg Nuendo 4, which we're about to take a look at), shedding overhead, and operating out of their home studios just as you do. So for smaller shops, this economic downturn might be the perfect time to start thinking bigger.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when guys such as John Ross and Nelson Funk were setting up shop, audio post was a pay-to-play industry. Workstations that cost less than 100 grand were unheard of. Digidesign Pro Tools changed all that, of course, and then came host-based DAWs such as Nuendo. Now in its fourth release, Nuendo is a fully mature product capable of handling any assignment you're likely to throw at it.

If you've used earlier versions, Nuendo 4 will seem familiar out of the box. Installation on either a Mac or Windows machine is straightforward, and the authorization process — which uses Steinberg's properietary dongle — is painless. In the past, users complained about the blurry line seperating Nuendo from Cubase; Nuendo was often seen simply as a more expensive version of the musical workstation, and the distinctions between the two were not as clear as they might have been. Steinberg has addressed this criticism by stripping out some of the extras and offering Nuendo 4 as an audio post application that includes basic MIDI record/playback options for $200 less than the street price of Nuendo 3, with the Nuendo Expansion Kit as an add-on. The Expansion Kit fills in the gaps by providing the musician/audio post engineer just about everything Cubase 4 offers, including its highly usable set of VST instruments, drum editor, and the surprisingly high-quality score-preparation tool.

Every popular digital audio workstation has the capability to play video files. Nuendo 4 can handle QuickTime movies on both the Mac and PC, and DirectShow and DirectX Video on Windows machines only. A variety of codecs, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV, are supported. But an audio post application designed to compete with high-end professional systems must also be able to synchronize external playback devices, and Nuendo 4 shines in this area.

Take a look at the Project Synchronization setup page and you'll begin to see where Nuendo 4 opens up its stride and moves away from the pack. For starters, two 9-pin devices can be incorporated into your setup, and either one of them can be your timecode source. (Note: Connections to 9-pin machines use serial ports, which the latest generation of Mac computers lack. If you plan on using Nuendo 4 on one of these computers, you'll need to adapt one of your USB ports.) You can also choose from several other source options. Your system's internal clock, MIDI timecode (not worth considering in a pro setting), or your ASIO (audio stream input/output) interface can be designated as the master. You can also choose VST (Virtual Studio Technology) System Link as the source of timecode if you have set up multiple computers and use this networking option. If you're a musician who chooses to run VST instruments on a separate computer, for example, and stream its output into your main mixing computer, you'll need to spend a little time working out the latency issues. But once you've established your setup, you're good to go. If you've simply allocated a computer to handle convolution reverb or other effects, latency shouldn't be a problem.

Nuendo 4 handles surround-sound flexibly. Hit the Input tab and you'll see the options laid out. You can also choose to record 5.1 as six discrete mono inputs, which gives you greater flexibility in terms of processing and routing. Multiple surround formats, with a maximum of 12 loudspeaker outputs, are supported. Downmixing (from 5.1 to stereo, for example) is handled by using Mix-Convert, which offers presets for the common conversions.