Conform Issues Database – Introduction

Well done, Dan. I have warned my clients before: the conform is often where most of the grief comes from, and if their editor (and/or assistant) was poorly-organized or used non-standard methods, things can go south very quickly. The biggest thing for me is FLATTEN THE TIMELINE BEFORE COLOR. I do not want 12 video tracks and 20 audio tracks. At best, give me 2 or 3 video tracks (at most), plus a reference track and/or the final mix. It’s very hard for some editors to grasp these simple requirements.

Biggest thing for me is to remind the editor that I need an offline reference clip that reflects the XML for color. Not a reference of the finished spot (although I want to have that as well).

I made this white paper up a while back (It may have dated slightly) which I’d send out to editors in advance of a session. Sometimes people would even read it. It’s geared more toward commercial edits but if it’s of any help to anyone then please use it.

I find it interesting that you like Resolve’s intergrated Media Manager. Didn’t you ever run into problems with it? Few weeks ago, I tried exactly that option: Copy only the files used in the edit to my drive to decimate 4TB of CinemaDNGs. On a brand new MacPro, Resolve always crashed during the process. It ran hours and hours, I even let it run for an entire night. The next morning, no media was copied. Resolve had freezed. So I don’t really want to rely on the Media Manager any more.

With less data, it seems to work better: On another project with 1.5TB of RAW data, it worked out but was very slow. Copying all the media to my drive via Finder would’ve been faster. At least I saved some space on my drive.

Great article, Dan! Looking forward to this series! With 4K+ shoots delivered at 1080, editorial resizes/repos have become common. I haven’t had the time to figure it out yet, but I have sometimes run into issues where those repos don’t come into Resolve properly, and repos that I do in Resolve don’t export properly. For expediency, I’ve found myself rendering out 4K clips on those repos and doing a copy/paste in Premiere on the Motion settings from the offline to the graded clips. It may (or may not) have something to do with the Scale to Frame Size and Set to Frame Size commands which have different effects on how it sizes the clip.

I’d love it if you could address this somewhere in the series.

Hey Dan, Your 7 A001 clips reminded me of a similar problem. It is something to look out for when getting Sony or Canon clips from a PPro project that are H264 (our favorite) One thing I discovered about PPro and Clips that are created with Zero start time, time code is that PPro “renumbers” the time code internally but it does not forward the information when leaving the “Adobe Universe”. I had a similar issue to your clips and had the editor send me the PPro project. The PPro bin showed the timecode differently. It turns out PPro when importing a series of clips of that nature (Sony/Canon H264 from one Card/Folder) will make Clip 1, Clip 2 etc have sequential timecode based on durations. Example being, the end timecode of Clip 1 becomes the start time code of Clip 2.
So the real time code of Clip 1 is. 00:00:00:00 to 00:01:02:03. Clip 2 also has a 00:00:00:00 start time code. BUT in the Bin, Adobe made the time code of Clip 2 start at 00:01:02:04 and it’s end time code/duration ripples to Clip three and so on.
It’s a rare occasion to get that type of footage (Thank you DPs with budgets and real cameras) but I wanted to share it incase someone else goes down that rabbit hole.

Separately, Thanks to you and the Mixing Light Boyz for creating and sharing a great database of helpful info. It’s difficult being locked in a dark room constantly and keeping up on our ever changing industry.

Be well,
Dario

I mostly work on 60 or 90 documentary movies, a lot of them are indies and they don’t have the time, the money and/or the skills to manage or convert their footage correctly. The conform process is daunting. Once, it took more than 7 days (!) just to finish it.

I have mixed results with the Media Manager, especially trimming footage. Most of the time, it just fails. I took the habit to tell my assistant to just copy the full clips used in the timeline instead of trimming it. There’s some waste of storage but it doesn’t fail anymore. (R12, I haven’t tried 12.5 yet)

Killer job rounding up some of the most common conform issues. Looking forward to more insights on this topic, as it may not be sexy and creative but it can sure take up a LOT of time. Thanks, Dan!

Apparently in the conform options for resolve if you say use frame count and there is non timecode > 0, it ignores the use frame count. I had to reset the timecode even though the frame counts matched on each clip. I had to reset like 1800 clips timecode to 0 ONE at a time on this feature recently.

Also make sure the reference movies are not in a h.264 or long GOP formats that can loose frames.

I am always amazed by how much push back I get from editors who don’t want to have to go through the timeline flattening it. The other day I was on a show where the editor attended a session and said we had the wrong clip, we were meant to use the one on track 3 not track 5

I hate H.264 reference movies. The clients rarely want to listen to my reasons why. I did just finish a job this week where the editor came in and was genuinely apologetic once we saw how many hoops we had to jump through to conform his feature. At no charge, he jumped in and fixed the last two reels and saved me quite a bit of time. We win our battles one day at a time.

I created a checklist for the editor before preparing the timeline and media for delivery. Initialy I followed the approach with as less tracks as possible, but as I had to handle timelines with a lot a vfx-shots, I adviced the editor for dedicated videotracks, depending on whether original footage or in someway edited footage landed on the picturelocked timeline.

The conform issue I hate the most is, when editors rename the clips to organize their project, instead of using the NLEs internal organizing tools.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1cc90926ff97f012ccd254d21a6f9650c1a94640e8d15e925f07359f4ee4e7dc.jpg

Editors who rename their camera files at the Finder level should have their hands replaced with a single toothpick when editing—this way they understand the mind-numbing torture they’re potentially imposing on creatives further down the post-production pipeline.

Thanks for sharing your check list!

Resolve won’t reset the TC for multiple clips at once in Clip Attributes? Talk about mind-numbing work.