Animation reconform

Matchbox Matchbox - Questions and Suggestions
#1

Hi,

Been reading up on this software and interested in making a purchase, but I have a few questions to see if it will fit into my workflow.

I have an animated series that needs to be reconformed to new picture. There’s about 12 episodes for this series. The showrunner decided to recast the main character VO actress and is changing the duration of each episode. I want to know how efficient and timesaving it would by using matchbox.

Few things to note. Not only has main VO character changed, but so has music. The only thing that is consistent is the temp FX, which will be replaced by new sound design. At the moment I have a new AAF, and the old AAF has been deleted off the server. What would be the best approach to achieve this reconform? Would a simple Video File comparison do the trick? Are there better alternatives? If the resources I currently have is the only thing available, would that suffice? Thanks in advance!

#2

Hi,
yeah, I would say use the picture as the basis for reconform.
Too much has changed on the audio side so very little will match when comparing the Old and New cuts.

If you don’t have any EDLs, Picture AAF etc, then you’re going to have to rely on “Matchup Video FILES”. Hopefully they haven’t added or changed any large watermarks across the middle of the image. You’ll also get better results if they’ve used the same video codec and frame size for both old and new.

#3

I tried to use Matchbox on an animated series I was working on and a big issue I had was I would have to conform from a wireframe or draft version to a colored final render and it just couldn’t compare these two. Maybe if there was an option that just did edge detection?

#4

Thanks for getting back to me. Really appreciate that.

That’s a good point Jamie. That would be a great additional feature.

#5

@jamiehardt - It already is doing some simplification (sorta) like this under the hood.
You’re probably reaching the limits of what it can do with the limited computing resources on current machines.

But Matchbox does already have a solution for your example: If you get the full AAF of the sequence, you’ll usually find that underneath the final render clip is the previous iteration (previz, wireframe etc). Matchbox knows to look under things in situations like this, so it can make a “Loose Match” when it finds a previous version of a shot hidden under a new version.