For recording and playback on the De-Lovely dub stage, supervising sound editor/dialog and music mixer John Ross put together a total of five systems based on Steinberg's Nuendo Version 2.0. The playback system that fed 168 channels of predubs to Stage 2's Euphonix System 5 console comprised three dual-processor Athlon 2800 CPUs running on Tyan server motherboards with MADI and UAD1 DSP cards and two channels of SCSI 320; Matrox Perhelia cards drove the video monitors. A fourth Nuendo system was used for playback of digital video, and a fifth system, hooked up via Ethernet, was used for stage support, with editor Walter Spencer able to access raw material such as dailies and sound effects libraries.

“With Nuendo, you can build a system that has tremendous track counts,” Ross comments. “And with the MADI interface, it's very easy to integrate with the console. Literally, everything we're hearing on the stage is hooked up to the core of the System 5 by just four BNC connectors. We're also running digital video that looks phenomenal.

“Because Nuendo uses a lot of the architecture in the host environment, it's all quite efficient,” he continues. “Other workstations would require much more DSP power to do the same thing. Although I have the Nuendo systems running on high-end server machines, they're still essentially stock Windows XP machines. Steinberg's ASIO open architecture allows you to build systems that live within a computer environment with incredible input/output options. You can build enormously powerful systems in a small footprint.”

On the dub stage, Ross, depending on the application, reached for both console and Nuendo functions. “The System 5 is, obviously, a very powerful console. The way I'm working with both it and Nuendo is to use the console in its more global scope to solve problems. It's the big lever and Nuendo is the tweezer.

“Nuendo is particularly useful for things like volume mapping. For example, where a piece of production sound we want to use gets too loud, I can go in and map it down. Because the volume graph is superimposed over the waveform, I can do minuscule volume moves that allow the sound to become far more intelligible. Or when someone turns his head off-mic, I can chase the sound very precisely with the built-in EQ.

“What's really great about all this,” he concludes, “is that you can design very complex systems to your own specs, scaled to whatever size you wish. The tools are maturing now so that we don't need to work within a monolithic environment. Instead, we can democratize the process and build systems really customized to our needs. I find that a very exciting prospect.”