I have got Cubase that came with the R16s but I have never used it. When you say DAW, I assume you are talking something similar to Adobe Audition as well which I have used in the past but all Adobe products seem to be very complex. My knowledge of more complex systems is limited and the amount of work I do with bands is not my main business. Any particular shortcomings with the R16?
As I do far less band work now than I used to, I was thinking of getting a small portable recorder for quick audio recordings at clubs and pubs. I like your synched 3x R16 setup, as most of my music work has been studio based with a 48 channel desk and Pro tools software. I completely understand that you are comfortable with the way that you work, but from your description, it sounds as though you are finding the limitations. It would also enable you to do anything else with the audio at a later date if you wanted because you could still keep a master of the multitrack on the DAW as well as the stereo mix. Like that, your final audio mix will have everything carefully balanced end eq adjusted so that you can concentrate on the video without audio distractions. Like that, if you have a section of vocal that needs tweaking, you will be doing it in the DAW but you will also have much more sophisticated sweep eq, compression, reverbs, etc using recording industry standard algorithms. I didn't mean setting up a computer for the live mix, I meant to do what you are doing now, but take the raw audio files and drop them into a DAW like Cubase for a high quality audio mix, before you use VPX for the video, which would give you much more flexibility than any video editor. I think I wasn't quite clear what I meant. We all work different ways of course but I find that the most efficient and easier than faffing with the audio mixing in VPX You could use multi cam edit, although personally I prefer to leave track one empty, stereo master audio on track two, and then cut and drag the clips into track one for the master video. It's then straight forward to drop the finished audio mix into VPX and edit the video to it after auto synching all the video tracks. I believe the Zoom recorders usually include a pretty good DAW. As you can replay all 16 tracks simultaneously, you should be able to carry out a good mix using the built in digital effects more efficiently than in VPX and again outputting a finished stereo mix. Alternatively, I believe you are recording the audio with a Zoom R16 which I think gives you 16 live inputs down to 8 simultaneous record tracks. You could also save the template for the next project, retaining the fx but deleting the audio. So in your situation, I would either use a DAW like Cubase to drop the audio tracks into and use the excellent mixing and FX in the programme, saving to an mp3 or Wav stereo master. I don't find any video editing programme great for audio editing for band work due to the limited facilities. I do though work differently to you though, treating the audio mix as an audio only project first. I've done a lot of band recording over the years, both studio and live, audio only and video/audio and still do band videos from time to time. I have probably just confused the hell out of you. I've done without the option for this long but it would be nice if they get around to fixing the problem with cutting the object. That is why I need it as a save option in the track effects within the mixer so it's the channel having reverb added rather than the object. When I right click on the object and choose reverb in the menu, as soon as I cut the object with the "T" then the audio becomes very distant. The most vocal tracks I have had is 8 from a vocal group and that is why I would like the ability to save the reverb setting within the mixer as a custom or user setting because I use the same reverb for most vocals. Just scroll down the page to find some band video's. Look up dugsbugs1 on Youtube to find some videos.
With a full band mic'd up, I end up with around 13 audio tracks to a multi track recorder and around 12 cameras. One part of my work is multi cam and multi track live band recording.