Reconforming workflow

Question

Hello hello,

I know there are a few related threads about re-conforming to new picture cuts on the board but they've only really been nibbled at, and I'm keen to hear about people's re-conforming habits in more detail should they care to share.

Up until recently most of the work coming through the studio I work at was locked -- including the shorts\features as often the picture editors were working upstairs and schedules were pretty generous meaning that we didn't have to get cracking on unlocked pictures. Also, in the years I've been here there's been a bit of a move from mostly TV towards more feature films.

I've just finished a project that went through so many iterations, partly because it's a co-pro and the notes just didn't stop coming.. and also because the schedule was tight. At the same time the demands on the sound were huge so there was just no point waiting for lock because of the amount of detail that it needed.

So for what it's worth, below is my workflow, and I'd be really keen to hear if there are better ways to do things from you folks who are working with film constantly. I know a lot of this stuff is really rudimentary but I might as well spell it out in case even the simple stuff can be bettered.

I'm using Conformalizer v3.2 which has been excellent, and am on PTLE8.0.4 with cptk

-Offline editor outputs EDLS for each video track at the end of each assembly, and they (tell avid to) keep the start and end of the Source tape names, so the middle is truncated.

-Import OLD and NEW .edl's in to conformalizer and create the changelist

-Reconform the guide audio and quicktime first to check that nothing crazy is going on.

-Make any changes to the changelist, add events for holes that you have material for.

-Create clusters of region groups for material, and avoid grouping too much silence. Region grouping the entire session makes things a lot slower it would seem.

-Move entire session down to #x hours and tell conformalizer how much to offset the source by.

-Make all those tracks Inactive, and make quicktime offline.

-Thin All Automation (in an effort to quicken things up this seemed to help.. especially after 5 or so re-conforms where you've got so many consecutive identical breakpoints across x number of automation lanes)

-hit the button

-beer \ coffee \ SSD. and ready teh backhand for anyone nearing the computer.

Blah! Any steez-enhancing suggestions, please go ahead!

Answer 1

-Reconform the guide audio and quicktime first to check that nothing crazy is going on. -Make any changes to the changelist, add events for holes that you have material for.

this can be done from within conformalizer by importing the two corresponding pix.

-Make all those tracks Inactive, and make quicktime offline.

I don't actually do this myself - maybe I'm just being lazy. do people feel like it helps a lot?

-Create clusters of region groups for material, and avoid grouping too much silence. Region grouping the entire session makes things a lot slower it would seem.

this is a nice idea. you should also lower your UNDOs in PT to something like 4. it's the combo of memory heavy things like region groups and having to hold 32 of each in memory that causes the low memory issues

justin