 Hello Flame community. My name is Jeff Kyle, and I would love to share with you a tutorial that is my take on the Connected Conform workflow. For those who might be unfamiliar with the term, the Connected Conform is a workflow with the commercial industry in mind, and it allows you to very quickly and very easily update shots across multiple sequences in your project. Conceptually, I think it's pretty straightforward. First, you finish your conform, then you create connections between all of your shared clips. And finally, when you finish working on a shot, and it's time to put that shot into your cuts, all you have to do is replace it in one of the sequences, and it is automatically replaced in all of the other sequences that that clip is connected with. Obviously, if you have a project that's just a 30 and a 15, this is a lot less exciting, but as soon as you start to think about those larger projects with tons of shots and tons of versions, it starts to make a whole lot of sense, and it starts to save you a whole lot of time. But even though those large projects are the perfect use case for the Connected Conform, they're also usually the ones that are such a big deal that you really can't afford to have anything go wrong. So with that in mind, it's my goal here to create something of a Connected Conform crash course to help people better understand how I have managed to make it work for me in hopes that you will be able to make it work for you. I've separated this tutorial into three parts. In the first part, I'll be going over a handful of key concepts unique to the Connected Conform that you'll want to be familiar with to better understand why we're doing some of the things that we're doing. The second video will show you how to set up and use the Connected Conform workflow two ways. The first way is very straightforward in what I'd like to say is a bite-sized portion, and I think it's accessible to everyone regardless of project size or your comfort level. And the other half of that part is the full-fledged Connected Conform workflow for your big projects. How to set it up, but also how to keep it going. And the final video will focus on some of the advanced, more obscure aspects of the Connected Conform workflow that solve all sorts of problems that could come up along the way. So we will move right into the first key idea, which is the concept of sources. When I refer to sources, I'm talking about what I would like to call the behind-the-scenes clips that are associated with what we see as clips on the desktop, in a timeline, in batch, or in the library. The best way I've found to keep track of your sources is to right-click a clip in the timeline and look for the Jump to Shared Source Segment option on the right-click menu. If it's not there, then that's Flames' way of telling you that that is the only instance of that clip across all reels and sequences on your desktop. As soon as that clip exists in more than one place through, let's say, an Alt Shift Drag duplicate clip on your desktop, when you check that right-click menu again, you'll see the Jump to Shared Source Segment option and gain the ability to see exactly where it's used by jumping to a different sequence or just a different section of your timeline. In another scenario, here's a clip on the desktop and it is the only instance of this clip. If I make a quick copy of it, I can see it's used in two places on my desktop, but that there's still only one behind-the-scenes clip associated with it. But if you were to import this same clip again, even though we know it's the same clip, Flame has no way of knowing this because the act of importing a clip a second time creates another behind-the-scenes version of it. I think understanding sources this way is at the foundation of the Connected Conform workflow because a lot of things hinge on these behind-the-scenes sources. It's also very much worth mentioning on the subject of sources that the library acts as a protected space. Anything that you put into the library is protected from anything that you do to those same clips on the desktop. You can use this to your advantage by saving your work at different stages of your conform without worrying about messing up any of the connections that you've made. And one other very big gotcha that's definitely worth mentioning is the act of consolidating handles. When you use the Consolidate Handles feature on the right-click menu, it actually creates a brand new source behind the scenes, which ruins any and all organization you may have had across multiple instances of that source. One solution here is to limit handles via unlinking the source and relinking it with the ConformTabs Limit Handles box. The only issue here is that Time Warps can really make the handle situation pretty complicated. So as one other option, it would not be the end of the world to use the Consolidate Handles feature when you're at the stage that you're creating your batch groups. Again, this will make a lot more sense when we start going over the actual workflow, but the important takeaway here is that Consolidating Handles via the right-click menu creates duplicate sources behind the scenes. Segment connections are the connection part of the connected conform, and it's what connects all the clips together. There are two ways to get your segments connected, with a regular segment connection and with source segment connections. Regular segment connections are what I like to think of as manual connections. You right-click on any clip and click Create Segment Connection. The key indicator here is the little chain link icon that appears on the segment, signifying this clip is connected. By default, once you do a regular segment connection, aside from the little icon, it isn't actually connected to anything, just itself. You can check this by right-clicking on it and looking for the Jump to Connected Segment button. Since nothing is here, you know it's only connected to itself. But if you take that clip and put it into different sequences, either via copy and pasting the clip or dragging it to the desktop and placing it into the different sequences, the clips in question will all be connected. Again, checking for this by right-clicking on the clip and looking for the Jump to Connected Segment drop-down. The other way to create segment connections, and one that I think is a lot more useful and a lot less manual, is the Source Segment Connection. A Source Segment Connection creates a connection between all of the clips on the desktop that share the same source. And this is the main reason why it's so important to be careful about your sources. Whether it's one clip used one time, or one clip used a hundred times, it all happens at once when you create a Source Segment Connection. Whenever you create a Source Segment Connection, a dialog box pops up with a few handy options. The first option gives you the chance to affect either the sequences real only if you leave it checked, or if you uncheck it, the Source Segment Connection will affect sources in any sequence on your desktop. This first option is more about keeping your workflows flexible, not pigeonholing you into any one organizational structure by forcing you to use the sequences real. Overwrite existing connections has to do with whether there are any connections there already, so if this is the first time you're creating these connections for the project, this is a non-issue because there wouldn't be any other connections. If you've already made some connections, this will clearly overwrite them. The next option is a subject we'll talk about in a little bit, but this gives you the option to sync all of the timeline effects on your connected clips. A very dangerous button, actually. For the connected conform workflow, I won't say it's very rare that you'd want to turn it on, but you definitely have to be cognizant of what kinds of timeline effects you have on your other clips in your sequences. And finally, harmonize groups across sequences is a subject that probably has a bit more to do with color grading than it does with the connected conform, although the two do certainly overlap. But it has to do with group creation in the effects tab and organizing your clips into groups, so if you're using groups to organize shots within your sequence, that option will send that group data to the other sequences your clips are connected to. And those are the four options. Once you've chosen the settings you want, you click create, and all of a sudden, every instance of that clip on your desktop or in your sequences reel has the chain link icon and is now connected. Once a clip is connected, it means that if you replace that clip in one sequence, it will be replaced everywhere else it's connected to on the desktop. I have what is universally accepted in the tutorial world as a completed shot here on my desktop and we're going to put it into our connected conform. First, I click on the clip in the timeline in an open sequence. Next, I click on the clip I would like to replace it with on my desktop. And finally, I press control shift R and that replaces it everywhere. Plus, in every sequence in which it was replaced, Flame very conveniently jumps to the shot in question, so you can very quickly and easily confirm that the shot was indeed updated in all of the sequences that you expect it to be. The next subject we'll talk about is what I'm calling the duplicate workflow. This is the shot versioning part of the connected conform and similar to the section on segment connections, it has two pathways, duplicate source and duplicate connected segment. Duplicate source is something of a manual duplication in that it only affects itself. If you take a clip that's used in multiple places and duplicate source, you'll find that the clip you duplicated no longer has any shared sources because it's behind the scenes clip was duplicated. Just as the regular segment connection is a more manual type of connection compared to the source segment connection, I see duplicate source as a more manual form of the other pathway, duplicate connected segment. Duplicate connected segment creates a duplicate of the selected source in every sequence that it exists on the desktop. When you click on it, a dialog box pops up clarifying where you would like the duplication to take place in the current sequence, in any open sequences in the current reel, in all sequence reels or in all reels in the whole reel group. And then what you would like to happen, either duplicate segments or replace on current segments and then finally where you would like the duplication to take place either above or below. When you choose duplicate segments, the source will be duplicated in every sequence that it's used. All of the original segments are connected to each other and all of the newly duplicated segments are connected to each other. What this means is that you have now successfully prepared yourself to version up your shots without going into each sequence and manually duplicating them yourself. It also maintains the correct connections so that when you replace media on one set of them, it leaves the other set alone. This is what allows you to version your timeline so you can show before and afters or show different stages of the compositing work you've done along the way. The source of sequence is another core feature of the connected conform that analyzes all of the shots within the sequences in the sequences reel and creates a single sequence that intelligently contains the longest durations of all of the sources that you're using. It factors in time warps and handles to give you your shots that are the correct duration and it removes all of the other timeline effects. I think it's a pretty logical starting point for the connected conform because it allows you to create all of your source segment connections in one place without having to look through different sequences to make sure that you've got everything. To create it, you first ensure that your sequences you're looking to analyze are in a sequences reel on your desktop. Then, you go to the conform tab and click create sources sequence. You have the option of organizing it two ways, either via source timecode, also known as C mode, which keeps the media in timecode order based on the source media's timecode, or record timecode, also known as A mode, which essentially keeps the media in the same order that you have in your cut. Careful inspection of your sources sequence will give you a lot of information about your sequences. If anything seems out of place or just plain wrong, it's been my experience that there's good reason for it and that the problem has less to do with how the sources sequence is being created and more to do with what's going on in your different sequences. But we'll go over that in the next video. There's one other key feature about the sources sequence I'd like to talk about and I think it's pretty convenient. Keeping in mind everything we talked about regarding how behind-the-scenes sources work and what it means to import a source multiple times, when you create a sources sequence, flame is doing a lot under the hood as it looks through the different sequences. When you create that sources sequence, one of the things flame is doing is figuring out if a source has been imported multiple times and if it has, it gets consolidated so there are no duplicates. Here's an example. This is a very simple timeline where I've imported three shots twice. If we check the right-click menu to see if any sources are shared, we can see that since there is no drop-down, all of these sources are unique. If I alt-click on any one of them, I can see that they're identical and that they come from the very same source on my server. But since I imported them twice, they're still separate behind the scenes. But once I create a sources sequence with this timeline, flame realizes that these sources are from the exact same source and it re-associates those connections. That's why there are only three sources here in the source sequence but there were six in the timeline. Now, when I right-click on any one of these, flame recognizes that they are the same behind-the-scenes source and we can tell that from the drop-down menu. This is a big deal because it cleans up a lot of the problems that could come up along the way from handing a conform to multiple artists or conforming spots across multiple days. This didn't used to work this way and I not so fondly remember a time where you had to be extra careful about your sources. But the big takeaway here is that after you've created your sources sequence, you don't have as much leniency with your sources. A great example of this is if you were to consolidate your handles like we were talking about before but do it here in your sources sequence, your source here would be disconnected from its conforms and since you already made your sources sequence, it would stay that way. If you aren't too far into the job, you can always recreate your sources sequence and that would fix the problem. But the further into the job you are, the harder it is to just start over. Once again, we'll go over some of the more intricate details about how to handle this kind of scenario in that third video. But for now, that's the sources sequence. The shot sequence is very similar to the sources sequence in that it also analyzes all of the shots within the sequences in the sequences reel and intelligently contains the longest durations of all of your sources. It's different in that it automatically creates source segment connections across all of the clips, which I think is a plus, and it also recreates the vertical compositing in the timeline, which is possibly another plus. But to me, the biggest negative is that it does not remove time warps and it really doesn't give you any options for working with them. This means that any shot that is the same source but has a different time warp across different sequences is treated as a separate shot. To me, this is a deal breaker. In the commercial world, it's been my experience that we would almost always want to work on shots before the time warp is applied, or at least choose one time warp to bake in that works for all the shots. But it's definitely a last resort to do a compositing shot multiple times just because it has potentially slightly different time warps. Here's an example. I have my sequences in a sequences reel and I've just created a shot sequence. After careful inspection, we can see that this shot is the same shot used multiple times. A closer look shows us that the clip on the left has no time warp and the clip on the right has the 200% time warp that's used in the 6 second spot. 200% isn't too bad and I've decided that I'd like to not bake in this time warp. I just want to do the shot once. The way it's set up right now, I can't just incidentally choose to work on the non-time warp version because the time warp version is connected to the clips in the 6 second spot. Fixing it is not too big a deal. I just remove the time warp version, remove the segment connection on the non-time warp version and create a source segment connection which connects this version to every instance of it again just like I want. It's this process of fixing the shot sequence that led me to the conclusion that I just stick with the sources sequence from the start. There are, of course, circumstances where it would make sense to leave the shot sequence alone and let it work the way that it does. For example, if one instance of a shot has an extreme time warp and another instance of the shot has no time warp, it might make sense to do the shot twice. Then, the fact that the shot sequence has set you up this way is perfect. In that case, you would want to treat those two shots differently and do the shot twice in batch. But in all the times I've used the Connect to Conform, this might have happened once or twice in several years. It's because of this that I prefer to have a little more control by using the sources sequence with source segment connections just so I know what I'm getting into and hopefully to avoid doing extra work if there happens to be different time warps across different sequences. The Update Sources Sequence and Update Shot Sequence feature dynamically updates your sources or shot sequence based on a new cut that you add to your sequences reel. Flame analyzes the existing sequences to see what's changed and updates the sequences accordingly, providing you with markers to indicate what's changed. When it comes to this feature, similar to my feelings about the shot sequence, I find that you have to be pretty prepared for some of the little hurdles along the way in order to make sense of it. In Update, Flame is smart enough to see the differences between the existing sequences and the new sequences, but it isn't smart enough to see what you've changed about the source sequence or shot sequence itself. Instead, it really just recreates the sources or shot sequence. So if the first time around, you found that the shot sequence or the source sequence had done something you didn't want it to do and you took the time to fix it, say bake in a time warp or remove a sequence and change it to something else, once you hit Update, it takes you a second time. I'll be going over some of the specific workarounds for these hurdles in the third video. The final feature in question is the concept of syncing. Syncing is one of those features that's either very powerful or very destructive. You just have to know how it works and know what it's doing and then you're good to go. When you press the sync button on a clip, it takes all of the timeline effects of that clip and all of their settings and sends them to all of the clips There are three ways that you can sync. The first is right clicking on a clip in a sequence and pressing the sync button. The second is what we looked at earlier in this video with source segment connections. That dialogue option lets you choose to sync them at the same time that you create the source segment connection. And the third and most usable, in my opinion, is a timeline effects sync that only syncs the specific timeline effects that you choose. I've noticed that you have to be extra careful syncing things of differing aspect ratios when you're using the resize node, so that way the timeline effects resize node doesn't allow you to change the destination resolution in the timeline. You can really break your resize nodes if you start syncing clips this way and you end up having to reset it which really defeats the purpose of trying to sync it in the first place. But where sync excels is sending things like a color correction to every instance of a particular shot, you apply the effect on one shot and with one click of the button it's automatically sent everywhere else it exists. That's a sequence to another, incredibly fast. And those are all the key ideas that I thought acted as a nice primer for jumping into the connected conform. In the next video we're going to go over how to set it all up and how to actually use it in a normal production environment for a typical commercial 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, I would love to chat. You can find me and a whole bunch of other members of the Flame community over on the logic forums or on the 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 video. Thanks for listening.