Alexander Brandon
The role of Nuendo in game audio.
With more than 20 years of sound design experience and major game audio production credits (including Tyrian, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex and Deus Ex Invisible War), Texas-based Alexander Brandon counts on Steinberg Nuendo to deliver the best immersive sound, spatial audio and audio rendering for film, video and game music. In this video, he explains why and gives a crash course on producing audio for gaming.
Brandon has been using Nuendo since 2002. “[It allows me] to build anything I need content-wise,” he enthuses, “with instantaneous connectivity straight into game engines like Audiokinetic Wwise. And because it connects directly to the game software, I don’t need engineers, I don’t need third-party software; it’s all self-contained and that just makes the process of creativity that much easier.”
“It’s rare to see pro audio [companies] working with different industries,” he adds. “Particularly games, because they’ve been separate for so long and there are a lot of commercial and technological considerations about how they would work together. But Steinberg took those steps and said, ‘Hey, let’s incorporate game audio. Let’s take these professionals seriously and provide them the tools they need.’”
In addition to its gaming-specific features, Brandon is also a big fan of Nuendo’s MediaBay. “It’s something that I use constantly. It’s where all of my sounds live, and their metadata instantly gets imported so that I know what I’m looking at; I can sort by duration [for example] and just drag it into my Project. So my building blocks come from MediaBay.”
Brandon also finds himself frequently using Nuendo’s Renamer tool in conjunction with script spreadsheets. “It enables me to apply filenames to the same order of takes in a single track,” he explains. “That’s something that game software has needed for quite some time, because all of that was done by hand before; [with Nuendo,] it’s automated.”
Another Nuendo feature Alex finds especially useful is its ability to do offline file processing, particularly since modern games can often contain many thousands of files. “You can add plug-in effects; you can change the volume of files; you can change their format or rename them. Being able to do all these things in batches is super-important.”
“Particularly with the game functionality, it’s a no-brainer,” he affirms. “Every game audio engineer should use Nuendo.”
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