 Hello, once more, FlameCommunity. My name is Jeff Kyle and this is Part 3, the final video of the 3-part tutorial covering my take on the Connected Conform workflow. By now, we've wrapped our heads around what it is, taking a pretty detailed look at many of the features surrounding the Connected Conform, and then we went into the specifics of exactly how I use it and what it looks like to set it up and get it going. For Part 2, I thought it would be pretty disruptive to interrupt the main tutorial video with tangents about some very specific details. I wanted to try to make that tutorial as clear and straightforward as possible, but I would feel like the series as a whole would be pretty incomplete if I didn't mention some of these glaring gotchas that I've run into. Maybe they're self-evident based on the lessons that we've covered so far, but if not, just to be safe, welcome to Part 3, where I go through a handful of tips that I think will be very valuable to keep in mind as you take on your own Connected Conform job. The first subject we'll go over is updating a sources sequence. If you watched the first video, we covered what it means to update a source sequence via the Update Source Sequence button. You bring in your new conform, put it in the Sequences Reel, and when you hit Update, Flame analyzes all of the sequences, shows you what's changed, and gives you a brand new source sequence. In some circumstances, this isn't a problem, but if you're using the Connected Conform the way that I've gone over it, then depending on what stage of the job you're on, you can easily run into some setbacks. If you take a look at what happens when you use the Update Source Sequence button, you'll see your connections are gone, the clips' versions are no longer stacked in a way that represents the version that you've set up, and the colors are all gone. You can take some time to go through the source sequence and fix it, getting it back to the way it used to be, but how easy that is really depends on the specifics of the job. Some jobs it's not too bad, other jobs it's just a complete nightmare. I'll show you how I've managed to find a way to work around this. Here's the scenario. You're using the Connected Conform, and you've already set things up. You have some compositing work completed like I have here, a source of sequence, several conforms. Now, there's a new cut in question, and we need to work it into our existing Connected Conform infrastructure. As with a few workflows we've gone over, I have two pathways for us, depending on how many new spots and new shots we're working on. This first one has to do with a simple scenario. If you have one new spot, not a whole lot of new shots, afterwards we'll go over a little bit more of an advanced pathway that's better suited if you have a whole lot of new spots and a bunch of shots. But for now, for the simple scenario, once you bring in the EDL of the new spot, before you've even started conforming, you'd want to match out all of the footage from your source of sequence onto your desktop. When you match out footage that has connections on it, those connections remain intact through the match. What this means is that when you set your search location to that location on your desktop and conform your spots using the matched out footage, the new spot will have all of the connections that you already set up. This works perfectly for shots that exist in both the old spots and the new spot. But the big curve ball would be shots that only exist in the new spot, shots that haven't yet been imported. So to handle that, first I would mark those new shots that you haven't yet linked with a color, so they're easy to see, which will make a lot of sense in a minute. Then you can link them to the footage on the sand. Once the footage is in, you would conform the spot to make sure everything matches. In my case, I know it matches because I'm the one who edited it, but for you, once you're feeling good about the conform, since there aren't a whole lot of new shots, you can select all of the new shots, match them out to the desktop, and at this point you can get rid of the footage you used to conform earlier, and manually place those shots at the end of your source of sequence. All that's left now are some of the same steps that we've already taken to select the clips in the source of sequence. Create a source segment connection, which connects it from here in the source of sequence to the spot that they're used. Take the existing naming convention that you've set up for the shot names from an earlier shot, and apply it to these three at the end, and then go to the conform tab and use the create batch group to create your batch groups if these are shots you're going to be working on. And that's it for the simple workflow. If there are a lot of new shots or a lot of new spots, anything more than just a few, then we would take door number two, the more advanced route. Let's go back to the scenario we were just looking at. We have our EDLs we've imported, but in this case, let's say there's four new spots instead of just one, which makes it so manually figuring out the longest durations of all the new shots is not something you can just know without doing some digging. So first I'll just make sure that everything is backed up into the library. And then, same as before, I'll match out all the sources in the source sequence to the desktop. I'll open up these four new conforms and set that desktop location as my search location for the conform. Now you link your new cuts to the existing footage just like we did before. I can pop into each of the cuts and just link them one by one. But if I wanted to be a little fancier and this is very relevant to what we'll be doing next in just a moment, I could create a quick temporary source sequence that we're creating just for the purpose of getting that new footage into our cuts. With this new source of sequence, all of the unlinked footage is in one sequence where we can easily link all of the existing footage at once. Make sure this handy keep clip name checkbox is checked so that the names of your clips are correct and then link your footage. Now, all of the old sources from my existing cuts are placed into my new cuts with their connections intact. The only thing missing is that when we link footage like this, the color doesn't get transferred over, as you can see by looking at this new cut. This is a completed composite shot, but it isn't marked red. The quick fix for this is to go back into our original source of sequence, select all of that color with the search magnifying glass and just reapply the color, which sends it to all of the sequences again because everything is already connected. But we still have the issue of the new shots that are not yet linked. The first step here is to select all of my unlinked clips in the newly created source of sequence. And I can do that with the nice search magnifying glass feature here and select my unlinked clips and then set them to a color, let's say bright green. Now, I'll link this new footage to the footage on my sand since I haven't worked with it yet. Conform tab, I'll set my search location. I will navigate to the media folder. I will link the footage. And there we go. Once you're linked, I would say the next step is to go back to your cuts, all four of them in this case, and complete your conform. Make sure that they match your reference. This is more of a personal experience thing. In my scenario, since I am the editor, of course I wouldn't have any issues, but I think it's always safe to ensure your cuts match your reference after you've linked them, just in case your EDL didn't have the right time warps or something wasn't matching by default. I'm going to call this sequence the newly created source of sequence, sources sequence temp, just so we can keep track of it. To do a quick recap and just to set the stage here, we have our nine original cuts with their existing connected conform infrastructure connected to the original source of sequence with all of the connections and organization nicely set up. We have our four cuts that we just finished conforming and all of the existing shots with their connections to the nine original spots and the original source of sequence intact due to how we conformed the new spots. We matched out the existing shots and conformed using that existing already connected footage. But the new shots that weren't with us before have no connections whatsoever. We have our new source of sequence temp that currently has no connections, but it does have the new shots. Our goal here is to get these new shots connected with the new spots and to merge everything back to that original source of sequence so it's all in one place and it's all nice and organized. In my mind, the whole purpose of this new temporary source of sequence temp is really just to manage these new clips. So to make things a little clearer, let's delete everything but the new clips in this new source of sequence. I'll select just the green clips, move them to their own track and just delete the others and close the gap. Now that we've taken the time to conform these new cuts and match them against our reference, if we ran into any scenario where we had to modify the time warp of a shot or slip a shot at all, then we actually have to make another source of sequence. It sounds a little crazy, but if you think about it, you'll realize that the source of sequence temp was generated based on how the EDL was brought in, regardless of whether it was right or wrong relative to the reference picture. Now that we've fixed the sequences, those changes aren't reflected in the source of sequence temp, so we need to make a new source of sequence that does reflect those changes. But we're about to run into two more problems. One, making a new source of sequence forces us to replace our source of sequence temp, and two, since it's a new source of sequence, it comes in with no colors, so we won't have a great way of differentiating the new shots from the old shots. So we have to break the special connection that Flame has with this source of sequence temp by duplicating it. Now we can create a new source of sequence, and it's one that more accurately represents the handles used by the shots in the new cuts. To fix the colors, head back to source of sequence temp that we duplicated and preserved, and select all of the new shots, the green shots, and create some source segment connections to get them connected to that newly created source of sequence. Set it to green, and now you're back in action. With this all set up, we're ready to put this back into our original source of sequence, either by deleting all of the other media in this new source of sequence, and dropping the whole source of sequence into the old one, or just to do a quick copy and paste to get it from one sequence to the other. Either way gives us the same result, and it keeps the connections intact. Now it's just the matter of clean up. Clean up the desktop, get rid of any matched clips from earlier, and get rid of any extra source of sequence that we don't need anymore. You can change the green color back to normal, or you can keep the green color if you want. But other than that, we've successfully updated the source of sequence. The last few steps are just steps we've already gotten over before, which are to make sure that your shot names are set for the new clips, and then if we're doing compositing work on them, we can just select them, create batch group, and we're good to go. The next scenario we'll talk about is how to split one shot into multiple shots. We touched on this briefly when we talked about checking your source of sequence in the second video, but occasionally, you might run into a case where you have a relatively long shot, and one section is used in one spot, and another section is used in another spot, but that middle section is filled with a whole bunch of unused frames. When the source of sequence sees this scenario, it tries to do you a favor by consolidating it into one shot, but depending on how much empty space is in that middle area, it could be more trouble than it's worth to do those extra frames. Using a shot sequence could work in some scenarios, but for the same reason, I'm reluctant to use the shot sequence in general. For instance, if the time warps just aren't set up right, then that wouldn't work either. I think the right move here is to take that long shot and manually split it up into however many shots you need yourself, using a few tricks that I'll share with you now. In this scenario, we're at the stage of our workflow where we've finished conforming our spots, and we've just made our source of sequence. We were in the process of taking a quick look at our source of sequence to check it, and we noticed that this shot here is abnormally long. If we dig a little deeper and we poke around at our sources for this shot, we can start to see the full picture, and that is that multiple sections of the shot are used in multiple spots. But it's a little difficult to wrap our heads around the specifics of where and how they're used when we're just looking at the time code and the handle count, especially when time warps really mess with the handles. You'd have to do some crazy math to know for sure. Maybe a smarter person than me can figure it out, but the solution I've come up with here is to give myself something of a diagram that helps me visualize exactly where the shot is used. I very distinctly remember one job in particular where one 30-second shot was used something like 15 times, and I really needed to map it out in order to see where to split it up. In the end, even though it was used 15 times, there was so much overlap that I really only needed to split it up into two composite shots to cover the range of the frames that I needed. In this example here with our car commercial, it looks like we have a shot that's used nine times, but if we look a little closer, we can see that we have a 16-9, a one-by-one, and nine-by-16 spots in question, and if I flip between them, we can see that the shots are only different between the 30, the 15, and the six, so realistically, we're only dealing with three shots here. The first step in this visualization process is to match out the full-length shot from our source of sequence. Since the source of sequence is smart enough to know the full range of frames that we use in our cuts, we can be sure that one of the shots starts at the beginning, and another one of those shots ends at the end. I think it would make our lives a little easier if we set our match settings to preserve handles, and then we'll match out the long shot to our desktop. I'll just add the word split to the end of this sequence so that I know exactly what it is. Now, it's time to find that same shot in the other spots. I have it all queued up here to save some time, but once again, flipping through the 16-9, the one-by-one, and the nine-by-16 of the 30, I can see that they all use the same handles, so I can confidently say that this is just one shot here, so I'll match that out with the handles preserved. What's really cool and really important to note is that when you match out a shot that has a time warp on it like this one, flame makes sure the range of frames that it gives you is covered by the time warp, which is really key for what we're doing. I'll label this shot just with a 30 so we can keep track of it for later. After I drop it into the split sequence and just take a look at the head handles, I can see very clearly that it should be placed right at the beginning of the sequence here. Now, I'll go find the 15 shot, which is right here, and I'll match that one out, and I'll call this one 15. I'll drop this one into our split sequence and for this one, it's definitely not at the beginning of the shot, but I can make sure my field here is set to time code instead of frames with my control alt T shortcut and my flame hotkeys, and compare my sequences time code to the sources time code of the selected clip, which tells me that I should navigate to 16.02 and drop this shot right here. So now we are two thirds of the way there and we can start to see that these two shots are overlapping and we're definitely gonna wanna combine them. The last shot to grab is the six second spot, so I'll pop over there, match it out, name it 06 and drop it into the split sequence. I'll take a look at that source time code, which tells me to jump to 31.10. And there we go. It's looking like that's a pretty big gap in the middle there, just like we thought. If we just worked on this 25 second shot by itself, there would be a lot of unused frames right in the middle. Now, in a real world scenario, of course, we would take a good look at the shot and determine whether it's better to split it up or to leave it alone. Because if it was like a locked off shot, then we might consider just doing the long version instead of just doing it twice. But regardless of the answer to that question, let's say in this scenario, we've concluded that we do wanna split the shot up. So here's how we do it. Our goal here is to get one instance of the shot placed into the 30 and 15 and another instance of the shot placed into the six. You can do this manually, but what you have to be extra careful about is the fact that when you create a source of sequence again, which you would want to do since if you remember back, our current source of sequence has that shot in its incredibly long state. If any of your shots still have all of their handles, then even if you've severed the behind the scenes clips, the way Flame works is it re-associates those connections to try to help you. But in this case, it wouldn't be helping us. So we just have to make sure that we set this up in a way that will work when we create that source of sequence again. The key to all of this is that little fact that consolidating handles duplicates your behind the scenes source. So in that case, it would be serving two purposes and fits perfectly into what we would like to achieve here. So the first step is to make some cut points in this split sequence to separate out the shots that we'd like to use. And then I'll consolidate the handles based on the amount of handles I would plan to work with in batch. Let's say we're working with 10. So I'll set that to 10. I'll head to the second shot and do the same thing, make my cut points and consolidate those handles to 10. Now I can match these two shots out to the desktop so we can put them into our cuts. I'll do them one at a time and label them accordingly just so I can keep track of them. Now we need to create a source segment connection with the shot in question so that it gets connected with itself in all of the sequences. But what we do next is something we haven't done before, which I think is very cool. Once our connections are made, we're going to split off all of the spots that are going to get this first shot. So that's just the 30s and the 15s. So I'll take all six of them and put them into this reel here outside of the main sequences reel. And now I'm going to perform a duplicate connected segment but with settings that are different than what we use when we version clips. I'll change the scope to current reel so that only these six sequences are affected. And then I'll change the connection type to replace on current segments. What this does is make it so this shot is now connected to all of the other instances of it in the 30 and the 15, but only in the 30 and the 15. The six second spots are totally left alone. So now when I open one of these sequences and perform a replace media operation on this shot and the shot I've marked as 30 and 15 in the reel here, that shot that's been cut to the proper length with the correct number of handles is placed in all of the spots in this reel. So all that's left is to do the same thing to the six. Since we've connected the 30s and the 15s, the sixes are already connected from before so we don't need to do a duplicate connected segment. All that's left is to get the six second version from the shot we've trimmed, match it out to the desktop, rename it to stay organized, and then get it back into the cuts. I'll open up one of the six second versions, click on the clip in question in the timeline, click on that clip in the desktop and replace media. Now that this is all set up and we don't have any overlapping handles, I can create and overwrite the sources sequence. And what we find if we look at the sources sequence is that we have our shot properly split into two and we're all ready to go. One of them is named 3015, the other one is named six, and they are the correct length for their appropriate spot. The last little real world variable I have for us is how to bake in a time warp for a shot while still using the connected conform. The scenario here is pretty much the same as what we just went over for splitting shots. We have our conform spots and we've just made our sources sequence. We were going through the sources sequence checking it when we found one shot that was longer than all the others. In this case, after some inspection, we can see that there's just an incredibly significant time warp on that shot. It's a full 1000%. With that in mind, our options here are to either work on all 27 seconds of that shot or work on the shot after the time warp has been applied, bringing it down to a nice two and a half seconds. I think in this particular case, it's hard to imagine that we would work on that 10 times longer shot. So at this point, maybe we would have a conversation with the producer, with your client, with the editor if possible and see if there's any good reason not to work on the time warp version. If you get the green light, then we can get to work. The first step is just to see what you're working with. All of my shots have a 1000% time warp on it, but the durations aren't the same. The very handy jump to shared source segment can show us that it's the longest in the 30 second spots, shorter in the 15s, and the duration is shortest in the six second spots. We're going to want to base everything off of the longest duration shots. So I'll jump to one of the 30s. This would be a lot more complicated if we had different shots that use different sections of the shot. If we were worried about this, we could use some of the things we went over in the previous section where we split that one shot into multiple shots and we could map out and visualize every instance of our time warp shots into one sequence so we can just see how they're split up. For this example, we don't have to do that, but just know that that's an option too, if you need to. So here we are in the 30 and we're going to look at our time warp. Our goal here is to get a flattened version of this shot with the time warp baked in. We have to be careful though, because if we were to just drag this clip from the timeline to the desktop, we won't be working off the source resolution of the clip. Since when you drag it instead of matching it, it keeps the timeline effects resized based on the timeline's resolution. We want to be sure that we're working off the source resolution when we bake in the time warp. It just so happens in my particular scenario, my source footage is HD and my timeline is HD, but that's just me in this tutorial world. You might have sources that are larger than HD in your examples. And when it comes to matching, just as a note, I'm preserving handles just like we did in our previous example because I think that makes this a little simpler. So once that shot is matched out, we would want to head back to the 30 second spot and save the time warp as a setup. I've had much greater success saving the time warp rather than dragging it or copy and pasting it. Feel free to name it anything, I'll name mine A. Next we go to the shot that we matched out, add a time warp timeline effects, open it up and load the saved time warp. Now our source resolution shot has the time warp applied, but Flame doesn't know how long the clip should be, so we have to just do some trimming. I'll peek back in the spot in question and see how long the shot's supposed to be. Looks like 68 frames is the number, so I'm just gonna keep an eye on that frame count for the clip I'm working on on my desktop until it hits 68 and then I'm good. Next I'm just gonna do a sanity check to make sure nothing's gone wrong so far. The last thing you wanna do is be much further along and realize something's gone wrong. So I'll just drag the shot I've been working on back into the 30 and just double check that everything matches. It looks like it does, so I think I'm ready to bake it in. I'll go back to the sequence I've been working with, right click on it and commit the timeline effects. This preserves the handles but bakes in the time warp. Now we have to make a decision. We can either overwrite the existing shot or we can preserve that original shot and its time warp just in case we have to consult it or go back to it. I'm a fan of keeping it intact, but that's definitely something you can conclude yourself and choose to go whichever route that makes sense to you. Since we're preserving it, I'll just quickly make a source segment connection here to connect all of these clips and then duplicate the connected segment in all sequence reels, duplicate segments and set it to below. Now that we're duplicated, I can open one of these sequences, click on our baked in time warp shot on the desktop, click on the clip that I just duplicated and replace media. The shot with its baked in time warp is sent to all of the sequences. The only catch here is that in the different sequences there was already that time warp that was applied to the clip. So now you do have to go into each of the sequences and remove that time warp yourself. If you don't have different aspect ratio versions and there isn't any resizing going on that you've modified, you could sync them, but in my case I do happen to have different aspect ratios so I'll go in and just get rid of the time warp in each of my cuts. It's just a simple matter of alt clicking on it and since we just replaced it in all of these cuts, Flame has jumped right to the shot in question for me so it's pretty convenient. Now it's the simple matter of checking our work, making sure that everything looks correct in all the shots. In my case it's looking pretty good across all these shots. So now just to make sure everything is good in my source of sequence, I'll just remake that source of sequence and overwrite it and take a look at what we got. Since we decided to duplicate it, I should have two versions of that time warp shot in our source of sequence, one with the baked in time warp and one that's the original. To organize this source of sequence, I'll just add the time warp again. I can add a time warp timeline effects, load the time warp in question, drop it underneath the baked in time warp version and trim it to length. Now I've fixed my source of sequence and we have a baked in time warp shot in all of my cuts. And that's it for my section on real world variables for the connected conform. I really do hope it made sense and I sure hope you're able to make it work for you. If you'd like to chat about anything we went over here, maybe if it wasn't clear or if you wanna show me a better way to do some of this stuff, I would love to chat. You can find me on the logic forums over at forum.logic.tv or on the logic discord that I'll link in the description below. As you can maybe tell by now, I'm a big fan of the connected conform workflow in general. I find it to be a lot of fun and a big time saver. So really, any questions or comments or if you feel the same way, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, thanks a bunch for watching.