Hello everyone,
First of all excuse me for my English, I’m far from being fluent.
I’ve owned Matchbox for a while but don’t use it that much except for creating shot tracks.
Yesterday I had a very easy reconform to do and thought Matchbox would blast it, but it didn’t, I think I’m doing something wrong.
I’ve got this short movie that I’ve sound edited. This film’s particularity is there was no sound at all so they edited a mute version, I made a first pass of adding foleys/SFX/ambiences. After this pass the movie had to return to editing to adjust durations. I bounced the premix and sent them, stereo timecode WAVE file from Pro Tools. They synced the draft mix in the timeline (Resolve), shortened and adjusted cuts, cutting images alongside the draft mix to make a new edit. They sent me back a video reference, an XML and AAF as I requested.
In Matchbox, I loaded old video, the draft mix I hand sent them in old sequence and new video, new “mix” from resolve timeline and AAF in new sequence. Everything synced perfectly, AAF and XML had the same informations so I dropped the XML.
I didn’t want to use the video files to be a reference for conformation as cutaway shots have been added or moved. The audio data is not reliable, some sounds and ambiences are used multiple times, it’s still very draft. I just wanted to match the cuts they made in the mix to have the fewest edits in Pro Tools.
I thought I could easily matchup audio clips and have a quick reconform but couldn’t figure how to use “Match audio clips” “You need some matches before you can run a diff on them”.
I realised I had no audio clips in old sequence, only the mix, so I created an AAF with the the same draft mix they used to edit. Imported it fine in sync in old sequence.
same issue, “You need some matches before you can run a diff on them”.
I matched up audio files but it was not perfect.
I ended up reconforming manually in Pro Tools quite easily because there was not too many edits. The original mix started at 01h, I built the new one at 02h, just like Matchbox. I had to spot one by one the AAF clips to their original time stamps that are preserved in the AAF, keep the time selection and witch to the whole mix tracks and paste them to their new location. It took me a dozen of minutes but I would have preferred drinking coffee during that time.
I wonder why Matchbox couldn’t do that, get timecode information from the new sequence AAF audio clips and match on the old sequence…
It’s an important question for me because it’s a very reliable way of reconforming and most of the reconforms I usually have to do (not this case) are on finished movies that are slightly modified after sound edit or mix so editors clear their audio tracks, only keeping the audio mix they cut alongside image.
Thanks for reading me!
Regards.
