Levels Changing During Bounce - Please help!

[ReallyCoolKids]

Hello everyone,

I have seen a lot of people on this forum get answers they need when they are having unusual problems, so I hope it's OK for me to ask here:

I am mixing on-air promos for a TV network, and they have a max peak requirement of -12dBFS. No big deal, right?

Well, everything has been going fine for the last few weeks until today, when pro tools decided to add 1.6dB to everything I bounce.

To give an example, since I am doing commercials I make sure no peaks go over -12 and my RMS hovers around -20. (Yeah I know, we who make commercials are jerks.)

Take a look at screenshots. The instance of Insight on the left is what is displayed during real time bounce. The one on the right is what is displayed when i analyze the bounced file in audio suite. Why would they suddenly be different? I have been doing it this way for a while and the readouts in insight are almost always the same or close to the same thing. More significantly, the peaks have never gone over -12.1 until today. I use the limiter in Ozone 7 with "true peak limiting" turned on and I have not had any problems with this until now. Any ideas? I thought it might be something to do with mono summing during bounce but all that is turned off and I'm getting a stereo file.

This is a crazy small, quick project that should not have taken more than 5 mins, but I have been spending the last hour practically losing my mind over why the levels would change after bouncing. I am stumped. If anyone has any ideas, i'd love to hear them. I hope it's something dumb that I simply overlooked. I'm tired.

Hope everyone's having a good day out there!

[Frank Kruse]

Well your meter plugin is pre-fader while you're adding +1.6dB with your Mix Bus volume, which is then bounced to the file.

Hence the difference. Set your Mix Bus volume fader to 0dB and it should be identical.

Frank.

[ReallyCoolKids]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Well your meter plugin is pre-fader while you're adding +1.6dB with your Mix Bus volume, which is then bounced to the file.

Hence the difference. Set your Mix Bus volume fader to 0dB and it should be identical.

Frank.

Haha wow....I've never touched the master fader before. That's really weird.

I need more coffee. That's a bad mistake.

Thanks Frank!

Now to solve the problem of my music tracks randomly muting themselves for 2-3 seconds at a time....

[Starcrash]

Originally Posted by ReallyCoolKids

Now to solve the problem of my music tracks randomly muting themselves for 2-3 seconds at a time....

Check for mute automation. Either disable the mute playlist or edit it manually to remove the unintended mutes.

[ReallyCoolKids]

No mute automations....

turns out an izotope plugin was running in demo mode even though it had already been authorized. Quick fix. I'm slacking today!

Cheers!