I've just seen a question regarding sound conform for films, but it mostly seems to relate to people who have the budget for fancy software, and who are dealing with editors nice enough to provide fancy things like EDLs!
I'm still pretty new to the field but I've done quite a few short films now and directors seem to be constantly changing the "final cut". I use Nuendo, and I have been manually re-syncing the sound edit to each new "final cut" of the film. This is a very lengthy process, especially as they never tell me the list of edits that have been made. I was wondering if there was an easier way to do this for low-budget shorts where the team is tiny and things like a nice list of the cuts and changes to the edits are unheard of?
As a bit of an example, here's a recent situation:
I recently did the sound edit for a 30min film, and the director gave me 4 different cuts a couple of weeks ago (Directors Cut, Rights Free Cut, Festival Cut, Shorter Cut) and I hurridly did my best to sync everything back up as neatly as possible.
The original sync was fine, but he's concerned the dialogue might be slightly out of sync in a couple of places now. In all honesty it might well be slightly off by now, because everything has been shifted and tweaked at least 15 times... Every cut has apparently been "final", so I've had to conform it 15 times, and each time I've been manually syncing dialogue back to picture. It's also an unpaid gig. If I've learnt anything from unpaid work, it's that it is about 10,000 times more work than anything I've been paid to do.
Essentially what I'm asking is: Was there anything I could have done to prevent sync issues whilst they were recutting the film, or is it just a pain in the arse that we have to grin and bear for low-budget productions?