Media 100 i's inerface. Click image to enlarge.

“One of my favorite new features anywhere in Media 100 i is that there are now five pop-up windows tracking timecode instead of three. As before, you can assign anything you want to them‹program length, gap length, audio or video time codes, etc.‹but I almost never found that three was enough.”

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July 20
First Look: Media 100 i (part 1, continued)
Here's one that I don't think I ever saw anyone ever request, but I really love. When you set the number of backups for a program in the prefs, it's a global number. Let's say you've set 99 backups. Do a few autosaves with a couple of programs open, a few Save Alls, and 99 backups get used up mighty quickly. So when you go to open a program that you haven't used in a few days or a few weeks, and look for a backup version, there aren't any: They've all been overwritten by the backups of newer programs. In Media 100 i, though, the backups are saved in a separate folder for each program. The backups for one program won't ever overwrite the backups of another. It's a small touch, but a thoughtful one.

There are new types of audio crossfades, for a total of three. In this build, they're called Equal Power, Exponential and Linear.

It's now much easier to force redigitization of programs at a new size (from 640 x 480 to 720 x 486, for example), and, better, new audio rates—no more hidden keystroke combination. (That hidden keystroke combination, by the way, turns out to have been something of a gift. The programmers for earlier versions of Media 100 hadn't had time to test the feature fully enough to feel comfortable documenting it, but when enough users asked for the ability to redigitize in this way, they simply revealed that the feature was there—a pretty thoughtful compromise, I think.)

How suite it is
The Edit Suite window has an entire suite of changes to it. The most obvious is that the subsampler window has been detached from the Edit Suite, which offers a number of advantages. I mentioned in the previous article that the window can be resized, and it can: to about double the size of the current one. I have to confess that I never, ever consult it, though: Even if it weren't too small, I want to see my images as they'll appear, interlaced and in YUV color. Which is why I was delighted to discover that I could shut that window altogether and free up a little more screen real estate.

It also frees up more real estate in the Edit Suite window itself. One of my favorite new features anywhere in Media 100 i is that there are now five pop-up windows tracking timecode instead of three. As before, you can assign anything you want to them—program length, gap length, audio or video time codes, etc.—but I almost never found that three was enough. Five, on the other hand, feels just right. With the subsampler eliminated, though, the Edit Suite window seems smaller to me, even with the additional popups.

Another extremely thoughtful feature is that users can set in preferences how the Edit Suite window behaves in relation to other windows, setting the priority for which windows cover others. The fact is that with its apparently smaller size, I didn't find the Edit Suite bumping into the timeline as often anyway.

"Special sauce"
That's the phrase Caren Anhder uses to describe the integration of BorisFX with Media 100 i, which I think is a playful understatement of what the combination of these two offers. Much of the power comes from the way they're tied together.

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