 Hi again Flame Community. My name is Jeff Kyle and this is part 2 of 3 of my tutorial on the Connected Conform workflow. Last video we covered just what the Connected Conform is and we broke down some of its key ideas. This part is about putting those ideas in context and showing you exactly how my version of the Connected Conform works in the real world. I'm splitting this video into two parts. The first part is what I'll call a light version of the Connected Conform. It's just a quick real world scenario of a job that did not start out using the Connected Conform but will go over how you can use some of the Connected Conform features to speed up a few things along the way. Even if the job began with no intention of using that Connected Conform. And the second part is just from start to finish my version of the full-fledged Connected Conform workflow. So here we are in our project going over the light version first. We have 4 sequences here, 16, 9, 30, 15, and a 6. And the 6 second spot has a 9 by 16 version as well. We're all conformed and we've even done some quick compositing work actually. All the shots are back in the sequences and we've versioned up those 4 shots that I worked on. So there's a before and after. The scenario we're in right now is that there's a shot that we got some notes on, theoretically. So we have to revise the shot and repost all 4 conforms since the shot is used in all 4 of them. I've taken the liberty of completing that revision beforehand so all we have to do is replace this new version in our 4 cuts. Traditionally, this would involve going to each cut, dropping the new shot in, and copy and pasting the timeline effects or dragging the timeline effects from the old version to the new version. So here's a way to speed things up without having done anything at all beforehand. You go to any instance of that clip you're going to replace, right-click on it to check its sources, and here you're just looking to confirm that this shot is indeed the same source as it is in all of the other cuts. When I check the Jump to Shared Source Segment menu, it looks like we are in good shape. I see the 4 total shots in the 4 different cuts. If this wasn't the case and these sources didn't share the same source, we would have to do some work to fix this. Which is something we'll go over in the next video, but not right now. Once we've confirmed that we're good to go when the source is front, we can create a source segment connection which connects every instance of this shot together. Which means in this case that this shot is connected across the 4 spots or sequences in question. The default settings are good, but we definitely want to make sure that we don't sync these clips. The 16.9 version would be completely ruined and who knows what else would happen. But so no syncing. Everything else looks good, so once we hit Create, we see the Chain Link icon telling us that they are indeed connected. Now because we've all been brought up to work this way, I think, we would want to duplicate the clip so we can see one of those before and afters of what we've done. So since it's already connected, all we have to do is duplicate the connected segment and we will be duplicating it in all 4 sequences. And there we have it. We can see here toggling between the sequences that that has indeed been duplicated in all of the sequences. So the last step here is to open a sequence and perform a Replace Media operation. You can see it right here on my Flame Hotkeys. It is Control-Shift-R. So I selected in the Timeline, selected in Batch and Replace Media. And we will see that it has been updated in all 4 sequences. No more AT&T logo. So that covers how to do quick batch versioning and replacement. But as one last tip for this section, I'll show you a quick way to sync Timeline effects across shared sequences that also doesn't require any setup whatsoever. Theoretically, if we got one last note from the client, if we pop to the beginning here, they think that the first shot feels a little bit too yellow. And I'm thinking that's a perfect scenario to use a quick adjustment in the Timeline. There's definitely no need to jump all the way to batch for this one. So I'll just put an image node on this shot and tweak it as needed, making it a lot less yellow. Once I'm done, I'm going to right-click on this shot and see where else it's used. Again, checking those sources. For the same reason that we checked them earlier, this only really works if the sources are correctly set up behind the scenes. But once we can confirm that, we can see that this shot is used twice. Once in the 30 and once in the 15. We're in good shape. So once I've confirmed this, without even setting up any connections, all I have to do is right-click on the Timeline effects in question, in this case the image node, and select sync image to shared source segments. And it sends that image node, in this case, to the other sequence. And just like that, the Timeline effects that I set up in one sequence was sent to a completely different sequence for its same-source counterpart. We didn't set up any connections, we just made sure they were the same source. I think it might be a misconception that if you don't set things up from the beginning that you won't be able to use workflows like this. And there's some truth to that in terms of some specific cases. Nearly all of these connected conform workflows hinge on your sources being in a nicely organized state behind the scenes. In a few minutes, we'll talk about some of the ways the source sequence fixes some of these source issues. And hopefully by the end of this video, the way this works will make a lot of sense. So that's my bite-sized section of how to use the connected conform even when you don't set it up that way. I think it's very applicable to those who might not be using any connected conform features and just want to see how a little bit of it works. But let's jump into the full-fledged connected conform workflow now. So we'll start out quite a bit closer to the beginning of a job. What we just saw was maybe, you know, middle-ish end of a job. So now we're at the beginning, even before the conform is done. One thing I think worth mentioning in this stage before your sequences are conformed is that I usually have a great time creating a sources sequence before anything is conformed. I know every job is different and some jobs are a lot more nightmarish than others when it comes to reading and interpreting EDLs, XMLs, and AAFs from AVID, Premiere, Resolve. The connected conform is not going to help you with a mess up EDL or XML or AAF. But sometimes starting out with a source of sequence when you're conforming can save you some time. Instead of jumping from sequence to sequence linking your sources each time, you can potentially link all of your sources at once in the source of sequence when you create one. Again, it can be hit or miss depending on your handles, on your speed changes, other XML weirdness. But it isn't very costly to give it a shot. And if it works, you've saved some time. If not, you just continue business as usual. But all of this is the preface for the very first step in our connected conform workflow, and that is to create a source of sequence. Whether you are able to create and use that source of sequence to link your footage early on or if you have to make it and remake it several times due to some handles or time warp issues, the bottom line is that the way we'll be using the connected conform, the first step is to create that source of sequence. Once your footage is all linked, your sequences are conformed, and you have a source of sequence, the second step is to check your source of sequence. I'd argue that you want to take a little bit of extra time on the front end to feel comfortable and confident that you're not doubling up your work later and that the sources you're working on are covering the range of frames that you need for the job. And as with anything, the more familiar you are with the workflow and the more familiar you are with the job you're working on, the faster this checking the source of sequence goes. So here's my checklist for checking your source of sequence. Number one on the list is to remove unnecessary footage. Depending on what stage of the conform process you're at, your source of sequence might have included graphics, reference pictures, audio, slates, etc. that could probably be removed from the source of sequence for clarity and conciseness. When you lock a track, it removes them from being considered when you create the source of sequence. And that's key for reference pictures, audio, and potentially graphics if you don't plan to manage graphics with the connected conform workflow. On the subject of graphics, if you do plan to manage graphics with the connected conform, it's worth mentioning that you cannot create a segment connection with matte containers. Containers can't be connected themselves. What goes inside of those containers is what can be connected, but the very nature of a matte container implies a separate matte and fill, which makes updating them a little awkward and involves a few extra steps. If you're going to insist on using them, they do work. But there is a wonderful alternative to the matte container, and that is the multi-channel clip. I think that worked just as well, and they're able to be connected with segment connections. All you have to do is when you're importing a graphic, you set it to multi-channel clip, and then you are good to go. Number two on our checklist is to remove duplicated shots. As I mentioned in the sources sequence section of the last video, there's a good chance this problem has almost completely gone away due to how the sources sequence re-associates behind-the-scenes sources when it's created. But I do think it's still worth mentioning just because I have run into this before, although admittedly it could have been older versions of Flame, but it's also good to be prepared just in case there are actual duplicates in the footage you receive from editorial or from the color grade. There are two ways I've found to look for duplicates that I think get the job done. The first way would be to just quickly jump from shot to shot and look at the broadcast monitor or the preview thumbnail to see if the shot remains the same when you land on the new shot. The second way is a little more thorough, but definitely less visual, and it involves taking a look at the conform tab. First, you make sure that hide linked button isn't checked, and then you sort all the clips by source timecode. You then just scan down the list and look for any two lines that share the same exact source timecode. If you find any duplicates, you can solve this by either unlinking both of them and re-linking them to the same single source, or unlink one of them and re-link it to the source that was already imported by matching it out to the desktop, set that reel as your search location, and re-link it. And after that, it's just cleanup. You're just getting rid of that shot on your desktop that you matched out and getting rid of the duplicate shot in your sources sequence that the behind-the-scenes sources have been fixed. Number three, and the final item on the list, is handling long duration footage. It's relatively easy to spot this scenario just by looking at your sources sequence. If 90% of your shots are one length, and then there's one or two shots that are much longer than all the others, take a look and see if you can figure out why. The first step here is to figure out whether there's some kind of mistake, or if the footage should actually be that long. If there's a huge time warp on the shot in question in the conform, then maybe the untimewarped shot really is that long. When you start to factor in handles and time warps, flames decision-making can start to get a little confusing. So when you're investigating all of this, the right-click menu Jump to Shared Source Segment is going to be your best friend in determining a lot of the information that you need. In the scenario where you have a very long shot due to a significant time warp, one solution is to bake in the time warp before doing any of your compositing work, and that's something we'll cover how to do in the last video. Another scenario when you're investigating long-duration footage would involve different sections of a source being used in different sequences. Flame tries to populate the sources sequence with as few clips as possible, combining whatever it can, which means that there could be very large gaps of unused footage. In one sequence, if you're using the first, let's say, 20% of the footage and then in another sequence you're using the last 20% of that same footage, then the middle 60% might be left completely unused. Depending on the length of the shot and the amount of handles that you plan to include in your composite, you can make a decision based on how difficult of a composite shot it is to either just include the extra unnecessary frames or work on splitting a shot into multiple shots. Again, this is something I'll go over how to do in the last video. One final note worth mentioning is that there's a slightly obscure setting you can play with in preferences, timeline, and then sources merge. You can tweak this setting to change the threshold by which Flame combines sources, but as with a few other things we've gone over, I've found this setting to be a little hit or miss. I've messed with it before and it didn't quite do what I thought it should do, but just know that if you run into some source merging weirdness, that setting could be what saves the day. Those are the three steps for checking your source of sequence, and on the one hand, if you're new to the connected conform and you're weighing your options here, it could seem like a lot of effort to so thoroughly check your source of sequence. And if you're really desperate for steps to skip, you technically can successfully use the connected conform workflow here without checking your source of sequence at all. But I really do think that once you know what to look for and how to look for it, this is absolutely worth your time and it really only takes a few minutes in a normal commercial scenario. It gives you some invaluable information about where your shots are used and what problems you might have with them that really does save you time in the long run, even if you aren't using the connected conform. But with that in mind, once you've taken the time to ensure your source of sequence is in a good place, the third step in our list is to create the connections between our clips. Select all of the sources in the source of sequence, right click, and select create source segment connection. Since all my sequences are in the sequences reel, I'll choose sequences reel only, and since I know I don't have any existing connections, this one doesn't matter, but it doesn't hurt to overwrite what isn't there, so I'll just turn it on. I absolutely do not want to sync my segments, not only because I happen to have sequences with different aspect ratios, but also because I'm doing this in my source of sequence. Flame automatically generated my source of sequence as a 1920x1080 sequence because that's what my longest sequence happens to be. But if you have any resize nodes here in the source of sequence, they'll be set to their default values. But all of the resize nodes and action nodes used in my different conforms are all carefully set up based on a reference picture. Syncing them would undo all of that work. So this is really a nuclear option that would undo a lot of the conform work that I've set up until this point. Very dangerous button. And finally, because I don't have any groups set up, this means nothing either, and we can hit create. Now, depending on the size of the job, for step four you can either set up a nice formal naming convention or you can stick with the original source names. Whichever path you take, Flame really does want you to use shot names and actually doesn't really let you continue until you set up those shot names. So once again, you select all of your sources, right click, and rename shot. If you're not setting up a formal naming convention, you can just set this to the source name token and move on. But in my case, I'll go forward with a real naming convention. I'll call this tut for tutorial underscore, and I'll use a token here for index. I'll add three pound sign hashtags to get three digits. I'll add a zero to the end so that every shot is incremented by 10. And there we go. Since we've set up segment connections, any renaming that we do here in the source of sequence carries over to all the other sequences. And one last tip here, while you have them all selected, if you're into color organization, you can change their color so that they're easily identifiable as composite shots. And again, that carries over to their connected counterparts as well. Once your shots are all named, step five is to determine which shots you'll be working on in batch and to duplicate them. If you know the answer to this, great. And if not, you can always do this at any time later. If you want to go the nuclear route, you can just prepare every shot and delete whichever ones you don't need later on, although that would involve a potentially messy timeline and a lot of extra work. So use that one with some discretion. Select the shots you'll be doing work on, right-click on them and select duplicate connected segment. I'm a fan of keeping one nice track with your latest versions instead of building new versions higher and higher, so I actually choose to send those connected segments below. The only caveat here is that Flame adds the word copy to the end of any duplicated segments, which I'm not a fan of, so I end up selecting all of those and getting rid of that copy text, since I generally would be leaving those lower clips alone, considering them to be my before clips. Step six is to create your batch groups. If you did end up setting a color, you can use the magnifying glass to very easily select all of those batch-ready shots, which is pretty cool. Obviously not a big deal if you have a few shots, but kind of a big deal if you have a lot of shots. And once they're selected, there's a chance you'll run into a bug that I've noticed, and that is that the create batch groups button is grayed out on a newly created sources sequence. The quick workaround here is to save your sources sequence into the library and pull a new one back out again, or alternatively you can just duplicate your sources sequence and open the newly duplicated one, and you should be able to create your batch groups then. For the sake of organization, just make sure to delete your original sources sequence because there's no need to have to. When you use this create batch group feature for the first time, you're given a dialog box asking you how you'd like to proceed. You can either go down the pathway of destination segments or the more manual replace media approach. Here's where I will admittedly get a little opinionated. Hopefully it isn't too divisive, but I generally recommend against the destination segments approach. If you choose to use destination segments, the benefits of that workflow are that your batch render node will automatically send your renders back to your timelines. The downside is that they have to go through this special version track that's created when you create the batch group in the first place. If you move that segment, then the connection between the timeline and the batch is broken. So it's my understanding that you pretty much have to take the segments in that special version track and copy it into your conform yourself, in each conform, which to me really defeats the purpose of having any kind of automation. I also find the extra version tracks to be a little disruptive for how I like to organize my timelines. I'm happy to admit that I could be missing something here, but this is where I've landed on this part of the workflow. With that in mind, I'll be going over the workflow that I use, which we can call the manual replace media workflow. And that involves choosing yes to the dialogue box. It appears when you go to create batch groups for the first time, which would make it so that there's no corresponding destination segment in any of your sequences. All that happens when you press that button is that your desktop fills up with batches that are named based on your shot names. My final note for this section is that your batch groups are created with all of the handles that are available for each shot. If you have a lot more handles than you want to work with in batch, you'll want to limit them before you press that create batch groups button. Since at this stage of the process, you already have segment connections, you don't have to worry that by limiting your handles, you're going to sever the connection of the behind the scenes sources because the integrity of your behind the scenes sources are really only important for when you're establishing those source segment connections in the first place. But at this stage, we've already done that, so you don't have to worry about that. So if you know that you only want to work with five frame handles, you can limit your handles here. And then when you create batch groups, if you peek into what was just created, you'll see that the handles are included and they're trimmed accordingly. And this leads us to step seven, which is the shortest step in tutorial world here, but usually the longest step in the real world, and that is to complete the compositing work. Once you've finished working, step eight is to replace the media back into your sequences. You select the completed shot, either still in the batch or once you've dragged it to your desktop, and with your sources sequence open, select its corresponding shot in the timeline. The key here is to make sure you're selecting the correct version of that shot, since in an earlier step we duplicated the source, so there should be two of them stacked up here. And so with the correct shot selected, you perform a replace media operation, which is right here. And for the default Flamehawk keys that I'm using, it's control shift R. Once you do that, it's replaced here in the source sequence, but also in every other sequence that it's used. If you notice the other sequences when I replace the shot, you'll see that they all jumped to the shot in question. This is a nice indicator that allows you to see all of the affected sequences. Each sequence moves the playhead to the shot that was most recently replaced, so it's easy to see what's changed if you want to take a look for yourself. And this brings us to our final step, step nine, which is to duplicate your connected segments based on any additional versions you want to create in the timeline. If the client just loves your work and you have no adjustments to make, you might not need this step, but if you want to make some changes to any of your shots and you want those changes to be represented in the timeline, you just need to repeat a few of the steps we did earlier. You find the shot you're looking to version up and click duplicate connected segment. Select the new version for the shot in question and then perform another replace media operation. We can see that the shot has successfully been replaced, the AT&T logo is gone. My source sequence got a little bit messy with that versioning there, but it's nothing that a quick fix can't solve. But if you take a look at the other sequences, they're unaffected, the versioning is perfect. And that is the full-fledged connected conform workflow that I know and love. I hope it was clear and I hope you learned something. In my next and final video in this series, I'll be going over a few of those advanced, more obscure aspects of the connected conform workflow that I've hinted at throughout these two videos. That last video is going to solve some very specific hurdles that pop up when you're using this workflow on a job. If you'd like to chat about anything we went over in this video, maybe if it wasn't clear to you or if you just want some clarification. Once again, I'm more than happy to chat. You can find me and a whole bunch of other members of the Flame community over on the Logic forums at forum.logic.tv. We're also on the Logic Discord that I'll link in the description below. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next and final video. Thanks for listening.