Reconform Survey - the results are in!

[The Cargo Cult]

Thankyou to all who contributed to the reconform survey.
We've passed the info along to Avid so we can now only hope that the clever people there understand the situation and can take some action.

A summarised version of the results are available below.
So what do you think?
Anything unexpected in there?

http://thecargocult.nz/press/Reconfo...ts3_Public.pdf

[Cheesehead]

Nice work Justin.
I hope it gets Avid on the case.

No surprise there about the level of re-conforming that is going on in our industry. Conformaliser has been a life and sanity saver for me.

Pro Tools really should have its own built in conforming routines which can tidy edits add crossfades, smooth automation etc.

As for the integration between Media Composer and PT, its woefully bad considering they're both made by the same company. This could be a massive selling point for Avid and its been ignored for years.

It boggles me that PT can't just open an MC session natively. How hard could that be? Get rid of all that unecessary AAF business and automaticaly link back to Audio from rushes without the massive cludge we have to go through now.

Maybe one day? Probably the same time we get some folders in the region list.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by Cheesehead

It boggles me that PT can't just open an MC session natively. How hard could that be? Get rid of all that unecessary AAF business and automaticaly link back to Audio from rushes without the massive cludge we have to go through now.

Maybe one day? Probably the same time we get some folders in the region list.

There are many reasons. Most important one is that MC is lightyears ahead of PT when it come to structuring a project for post. Project/Bins/Sequences/clips/sub-clips.

There is no such thing as an MC session. In MC the whole project is a structure unlike ProTools where one sequence IS one project. Cumbersome ways of interchanging parts of sessions by creating even more sessions etc. etc.

My guess is the best it would get is a "send sequence to ProTools"-feature (and hopefully back to MC). Everything else simply doesn't translate to the whole ProTools infrastructure simply because ProTools doesn't have that kind of housekeeping mechanisms that MC has.

Having said that, this wouldn't even cover the re-conform problem, obviously. This would just spare us a few AAF issues. But compared to the time we waste on re-conforms the AAF workflow is blazing fast. Almost a non-issue (well, unless you have to deal with Premiere ;-))

I'm not sure if there will ever be a solution for this unless AVID comes up with one unified work platform that doesn't differentiate between sound and picture editing. If we could do all the stuff we can do in PT on MC and vice versa we wouldn't need to translate, convert and use EDLs in the first place. And I'm not saying the picture editor should edit the sound effects. We need ONE program that combines MC and PT into one post-production application.
Everything else is just going to keep us translating, exporting, importing, converting, conforming etc.

F.

[kosmokrator]

I don't know... the Adobe guys tried to convince me to use Audition in my department by saying that we then could seamlessly work in the picture editors' timelines.
Ah, let me think, NO!!
I have no interest in working directly in the mega-confusing timeline of an ongoing picture edit.
In our house, editors have to properly tidy up their session before creating the AAF. I vastly prefer that.

And I really don't get all the Premiere issues people have. I truly think this is almost always editors that don't know what they do.
We get delivered Premiere AAFs 24/7 from 16 edit bays and have about zero problems except for the known relink bug which just needs some mouse clicks to solve.

[philper]

Originally Posted by kosmokrator

I don't know... the Adobe guys tried to convince me to use Audition in my department by saying that we then could seamlessly work in the picture editors' timelines.
Ah, let me think, NO!!
I have no interest in working directly in the mega-confusing timeline of an ongoing picture edit.
In our house, editors have to properly tidy up their session before creating the AAF. I vastly prefer that.

And I really don't get all the Premiere issues people have. I truly think this is almost always editors that don't know what they do.
We get delivered Premiere AAFs 24/7 from 16 edit bays and have about zero problems except for the known relink bug which just needs some mouse clicks to solve.

This--almost all of the issues I have or hear about in this connection are with one-off jobs where there is no opportunity to ramp-up a good workflow, so everyone does whatever worked last time, as far as they can remember. I find that it's a good idea to be proactive and email the editors ahead of the export to gauge their methods and how much they know about exports--it is unusual to have them contact me about this first....

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by kosmokrator

I don't know... the Adobe guys tried to convince me to use Audition in my department by saying that we then could seamlessly work in the picture editors' timelines.
Ah, let me think, NO!!
I have no interest in working directly in the mega-confusing timeline of an ongoing picture edit.
In our house, editors have to properly tidy up their session before creating the AAF. I vastly prefer that.

And I really don't get all the Premiere issues people have. I truly think this is almost always editors that don't know what they do.
We get delivered Premiere AAFs 24/7 from 16 edit bays and have about zero problems except for the known relink bug which just needs some mouse clicks to solve.

I too haven't had any AAF issues in many many years (unless FCP or something else is involved) but that doesn't help one bit with re-conforming which I think is the purpose of the survey.