[Floh Peters]

[Brian Groves] “If I purchase a track from a royalty free music house (Premiumbeats.com), and simply import it and place it on my timeline… Media 100 shows that the audio is WAY overblown… pegged in Red, lots of distortion, etc. So, in Media 100, I bring down the level of the track to -12 or -14db. It then “shows” the track playing where you would want it to… -20db to -10db in the audio window. When I then go to export that track and just play it as a quicktime movie or in iTunes… it sounds too quiet”

Actually what you are seeing (or hearing) is the difference between balanced and unbalanced audio outputs, plus the ability to change the levels on your Mac output. The out from the Kona card is set to a broadcast level and using balanced outputs, so the level is much higher compared to the Mac output.
When you play a clip via the Mac out, it will be much lower than the Kona output. As a test, you could set your system audio out to your Kona card temporarily to see what is going on there (System Preferences->Audio->Audio Output). Now if you play an imported song in Media 100 (leaving the levels untouched) and via QuickTime Player (or iTunes, as long as the iTunes level is not lowered) they should be identical.

Now, Music you buy is leveled to 0dBFS, which is the actual highest possible level for digital audio files. Everything above 0dBFS would give you digital clipping, which is really bad. If you do video editing, you usually aim for a much lower level, and you give yourself some room for digital peaks, dynamic in the movie and the fact that you usually don’t do a hard digital limiter to cut off your peaks. Plus, depending on which clients you produce for (e.g. TV Stations), you do have additional requirements, e.g. Loudness norms you have to follow. Therefore the audio level of videos you produce is usually lower than the level of a music track.
Now, depending on where you want to play back the clip, you can do some additional “magic” to make it as loud as possible. E.g. if you upload to YouTube or other sharing sites, a lot of audio processing like normalization is done there to make everything (more or less) equally loud. If you go to DVD (via DVDStudioPro), you have to encode the audio to AC3 with the correct settings depending on the way you mixed. If you want to post it somewhere else (like your website) you could do an audio “normalization” in an audio app before exporting your final master…

Again, this all depends on where and how you have to deliver your “master”.

[Floh Peters]

How do you monitor your audio? Which output do you use for Media 100 audio monitoring? If you have a Kona or BM card, these do give a different audio level than the Mac Line out output.

[Floh Peters]

[Jaeson Koszarsky] “Is AJA LHi driver 12.2.1 compatible with Media100 2.1.6? The FAQ mentions 12.2.
“

yes, it is.

[Floh Peters]

[Jaeson Koszarsky] “We are currently running two 2.1.5 licenses on our Mac Pros. Is the upgrade to 2.1.6 $99 or can I just DL the trial version to do the update?
“

Just download and install. Can be found in the FAQ on media100.com 😉

[Floh Peters]

Yes, I am using it with 10.10.3 without issues.

[Floh Peters]

Ok, for clarification until the release notes are updated: for “current” Aja hardware, the 12.1 driver is the minimum version that will work. I currently use the 12.2.1 beta driver and used 12.2, so they are also good to go with Media 100 2.1.6

[Floh Peters]

Hi Mark,

hmmm, the XDCam Transfer proxy images do work on my systems. What kind of Codec and Camera do you use?
Have you tried to delete and re-install the XDCam Transfer stuff? Have you checked the Cache Location and Cache Size under Preferences->Cache?

[Floh Peters]

10.6.1. There is a new version of M100 in the works to support the 12.1 driver

[Floh Peters]

You should find it in YourHomeFolder->Library->Preferences->Media 100 Suite Preferences->Media 100 ColorFX Sets. This is a single file containing all your saved ColorFX presets. So while you should be able to move it to a new system, you cannot “merge” different ColorFX presets from 2 stations.
One thing you could do, though, is to create a timeline with different clips with the different ColorFX you want to transfer, and open that on the other computer. Then you can save them again on the 2nd system.

[Floh Peters]

You can monitor in HD (1080) via HD-SDI, and of course you can export as a file in 4k