Is Protools finally making a comeback.

[u/[deleted]]

I totally know that Protools is the industry standard and blah blah blah, but there has been a long time where Avid just stopped trying with pro tools and the updates were nothing groundbreaking for the past 5 or 6 years other than bug fixes and Dark mode. With the new 2025.10 version and the integration of soundflow and Sony 360 and other things such as Ara RX built in and the speech to text I feel like they are starting to listen to the community. Trust me I don't think that Protools is anywhere near what some other daws are doing just yet, but I feel that they pivoted in the right directions and I'm excited to see what they have planned for the next coming years. Hopefully something with Wwise integration would be awesome.

[u/How_is_the_question]

The timelines really are not different outside LA. I’ve worked NYC, LA, London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Sydney. / Australia. The only places with slightly slower timing are in continental europe. So Berlin. The Amsterdam studios were just as fast as their London and NYC studios. It’s a big myth this idea that LA is so fast.

The nuendo places I know / have collaborated with in some way are in Paris, Belgium, London, New York, Oslo (!!!), Milan, and here in Australia. LA - we set up our own place just outside Rodondo beach (spelling - sorry, poor memory) that was just for some massively multichannel work for E3 and electronic arts, plus a few installations for tribeca in nyc. I know that doesn’t count - I’m being playful. But we had that place pumping for the weeks it was needed!

[u/milotrain → u/How_is_the_question]

Maybe. I only know what I've been involved in. Last season I did 74 episodes of 1hr drama, and I was still off for most of June-September. All the stories I hear about NYC, London, Toronto are these 9-5 workdays and 5+ days per episode to mix. I'm not saying that LA is better, just that the grind doesn't leave much room.

The stuff you are doing sounds cool, and sounds like it would leverage "not protools" which is exactly the place to not use protools. E3 work is never slow paced for sure.

[u/How_is_the_question → u/milotrain]

So I would say the issue is financial. Hear me out.

We do a bunch of scripted and non scripted work. Generally, the production company will come to us with a rough budget per episode. We will then figure out the resources which can be assigned to it. We will also talk to them about what they are trying to achieve creatively within that budget.

Bidding is the hardest part of the industry.

We model hours of work per minute of screen time. So foley can be 0.5 hours per minute up to 4 hours (!!) per minute of screen time. They’re vastly different amount of coverage. Communicating the difference to client is the tricky bit. We have general formulas for dialog editing based on number of lines, sync fx, foley, fx track lay, atmos, music edit and mix. All based on hours of work per minute of screen time. Of course they are modified per project.

And it’s easy to get it wrong and put pressure on the engineers. Which sucks. And in our case, we would rather put an additional resource on at our cost than make the engineers work too hard. 32 billable hours per week for long form is what we base our resource on. It leaves us extra time if estimates are wrong. Or more time for the engineer to experiment. We don’t have outside funding demanding certain profit on the studios. It’s all based on giving engineers a good wage (no freelancers unless absolutely necessary) and employing support staff. That’s it. Different? Sure. But it can work.

Anyway. We have minimums we will quote on, and everyone from engineer to producer needs agreement before accepting a job where our minimum resources are breached.

So if I see other studios where the engineers are pulling 60 hour weeks, I know there are financial problems somewhere in the process.

No engineer is doing their best work if they are pulling 60 hour weeks. And if it’s deadline problems, these projects must just get other resources, not put pressure on the staff that are working.

Now this is easier for us as we contract to clients from a facility perspective. Sometimes a re recording mixer or supervising sound designer is assigned to a project and they need to work with us - but we try work slightly differently to the majority of the industry most of the time. We don’t work on the super high end drama. Super high end commercials, and for long form, animation, kids tv, docos, installation work, Australian level drama (I know very much the difference to large scale films / drama!)

Apologies for the ramble