 And yes, Jeff, thank you for noticing. We've now updated to also include background music, God willing, so, and welcome. Welcome to another exciting Logic Live. Let's dive right in here. I'm going to see if I can fade the music out. Yes, success. Well, you know, if I was able to have background music and get it to fade out, I think we're ready to tackle connected conform. Welcome to Logic Live, everybody. My name's Andy. Today is episode 11, Connected Conform with Brian Bailey. Logic Live, as always, is brought to you by Cinesis Oceana, Solutions Integration and Support for Digital Content Creators. See everything they have to offer. See everything they have to offer at Cinesis.io. Cinesis has been my reseller for 15 years. They are huge supporters of the Flame community. They sponsor user groups all around North America and I would not be able to do what I do without their support. So thank you guys at Cinesis for always supporting Flame artists since 1997. All right, let me stop my screen share here and say, hey, here I am. So today we have a very special guest. Brian Bailey is a senior Flame artist at Treehouse in Dallas, Texas. And Brian is going to show us how he uses Flame's connected conform features to do the impossible, which is try to make sense out of our clients ever changing requests. I had the pleasure of trying out connected conform on a project over the past couple of weeks. And I think it's safe to say that if you embrace it for what it is, it's not a magic bullet. It doesn't make, all your problems go away. It doesn't make your clients somehow stop unapproving cuts or stop surprising you with versions you didn't know existed. But if you kind of embrace the workflow and then apply to it all of those great forensic skills that all of us Flame artists have, then you're definitely, there are some benefits to be reaped there as changes come down the line, which they always do. So with that little introduction out of the way, I'm gonna ask Brian Bailey to turn on his camera. Brian, are you there? Yeah, I can hear me. Hey, how's it going, man? Good, how are you? Good, good, good. Love your smile and face. And I want to give you mad props on the shirt, my friend. Yes. I figured that's something more than the T-shirts I've been wearing for three months. I love it. So you've decided to dress up now, which is great. I'm holding on to it, I'm still wearing shorts. And now at least the weather has caught up with my quarantine fashion sense. So Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Treehouse? Well, I've been running Flame for 15 years. Treehouse does boutique post-production, mostly commercials in Dallas. They also do a little bit of music videos, independent films. So what else? I think that's great. Are you like a horizontal reals guy or a vertical reals guy? Let's get down to what really matters. Never understood the vertical worlds. All right, moving on. So that's one of those questions where you're always going to piss off half the people. Why don't you go ahead and share your screen, share the flames screen there and let's get underway with some connected conform. What version of Flame are you running? I'm still in 2020.3. The pandemic came right when we were going to update our CentOS for the 2021, but we weren't able to do that yet, I'm not sure. Sweet. And yeah, if anybody has any questions, please be sure to put them in the Q&A panel and we'll get them answered that way. That way they don't get lost in the chat. All right, Brian, take it away. Uh-oh, we've lost Brian soon. There we are. Sorry, I have the kids screaming in the background. Oh, that's okay. And I'm making sure, you're getting my audio from my video screen, but you're getting this video screen. Oh, you're getting mine from the back side. Yeah, we're getting audio from your camera for now. Okay. So a couple things I'd like to say first, this project I'm gonna share thanks to the Home Depot and the Richards Group for letting me share it. It's a commercial we recently did before the pandemic, so things were normal back then supposedly. I think you mentioned the Dallas user group, I just wanted to mention our website there. If anybody's in the Dallas or Texas or Southern, I don't know, Southwest, try to come, we have guys that come up from Austin and join us, so that's cool. We do meetings four times a year. Awesome, and thank you for running the user group, man. It's a great thing that you do to keep the community going. And we're gonna do a really quick overview today. I wanted to promote the FX PhD class that Kristoff did because he really goes into depth with it. So you wanna really dive into this, look at this class. He does a great job. So with Connecting to Form, there's two basic paths I see of working with it, two approaches. One is BFX segments, and the other is batch groups, and they both have pros and cons. I'll go through this quickly. I don't wanna spend a whole lot of time because I wanna get to actual show and stuff, but with BFX segments, if you only need a few shots or if you just wanna connect being shot by shot, this is a great way to go. You can skip the sources sequence in the shot sequence completely if you wanna do this. You can just have a BFX segment, make it connected, and then go from there. You never have to deal with the sources and the shots. I like to use this method because when you archive with no renders and no cache, the project can be a couple megabytes. So it's real easy to restore and get back to work if you're able to work that way with your source media. Being available again to elect the way BFX segments handles the handles. You'll see with the batch groups, when you make a batch group, it rolls out the handles. So then you either have to deal with them or do the effects on all your handles or figure out the way to make the render node and not render all those handles. I do a lot of versioning where there's edits, it's like 30 or 15, and then as another layer on top of that, there's English and Spanish of the same things. So with BFX segments, it's really easy to duplicate a segment, say it's gonna now be the Spanish offer instead of the English. And then you can start forking off into multiple versions on top of versions. The main con that I see for the BFX segments is when I'll show you this, when you get to doing social deliverables like one by one, nine by 16, when you sync, you have to be careful not to sync the resizes or the repos that you're doing for those different versions. So I'll kind of show that here in a minute. And also another con is BFX segments with a lot of heavy stuff in them can really slow it down. And you might want to switch to batch instead so that you can close and load just the things you need. On the batch group sides, some pros are like the con of the BFX. Every shot is gonna have a lot of work and it's real heavy work and you're sharing it with other artists. Batch groups will be better. If you are in a big facility, you need to start on a certain frame and have a certain naming structure. Batch groups let you do that. You can always start on frame, you know, 1001. And for social deliverables, I'll show you how it handles that kind of better so you don't have to worry about messing up your resizes and repos. The cons to batch groups, in my opinion at least, is having to keep track of those batch group folders, you know, saving them to the library back and forth, loading them when you need them. You have to do lots of shot management. And like I was saying, the batch groups are created with the handles rolled out. So you have to figure out how you wanna deal with those. And with batch groups, you have to use shot names. I don't know if everybody, if I need to explain that, but your segment can have a name, but it also needs a shot name in order to have a batch group. Phil, so any questions? Nice one. Brian, I think I just wanted to cut in real quick. I think it's great that you put up that slide there to show the pros and cons of the BFX workflow versus the batch groups workflow because Connected Conform is all about creating connected segments, you know, and connected clips. And philosophically, I think how you approach, and you're gonna show this, but how you approach the Connected Conform workflow is different whether you're using BFX segments or if you're dealing with stuff that's coming out of batch groups. And so it's just good that you had this overview here, not to start another argument between people who prefer BFX or batch groups. There's nothing to do with this, but Connected Conform really does have it. The whole Connected Conform workflow has been an evolution. It was a rollout that happened over many releases of the Flame software. And now that we're finally, you know, kind of with it have a complete Connected Conform here, it's just very, very important that users know that depending on whether you're using BFX segments or batch groups, you need to kind of approach things differently. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And just like a lot of Flames features, they give you so many options that it can be overwhelming, you know, so many ways to get something done. So you kind of have to figure it out and pick and choose how you want to approach it. And I even do different things for different jobs. Like I might use the batch groups when I know every shot is going to be heavy effects. For the kind of example I'm showing today, I probably wouldn't, I would just do the batch effects route. Do we have time to talk about our customized things or should we skip that? No, let's do a customized thing. Let's go through it. Things that I wanted to share that I've customized that I think other people could benefit from too. The first one is action context menu. And you can watch a flame learning channel video on how to do this. But basically you can add your own group here in the action context menu. So I have the matchbox. These are matchboxes I use over and over and over. And if I have any kind of surface, the context menu lets you just real quickly add those things. So the matchboxes that I use over and over is what I mostly use that for. Yeah, that's a fantastic. The resolution list. This is another flame learning channel you can watch. You can customize the resolution list. So I've added social media folder here at the bottom. And it has social media resolutions. I use it in Python a lot. I know you did a class on Python recently. So I won't go too much into that. But I use one from, I think, Steffan created where if you right click on a sequence, you can color the time warp shots. And I deal with this a lot because my editors use weird time warps and they mess up the shot sequence of the connected conform. So I'll make the time warp segments red immediately. So I know I'm probably gonna have to deal with that in some way. Another Python thing, I just made a custom when I wanna create a new real group, make a real group with just the reels inside it that I want and they're colored and named just right. And then some preferences that I think are good to know about when you're doing with conforming connected conform. The first one is, I always have to remember where they are. When you make a batch group, what frame to start with? So you can put in your own there, 1001. Seems to be what a lot of facilities use. Make sure you go in and use the tokens to set default, iteration names, batch names, render node names. If you don't do a render node name, they can start to get confusing later when you're trying to backtrack from the timeline to a batch group under, or let's see, sources match. This I think is pretty new. I think this might have been in 2020, in 2019. So when we start dealing with creating a sources sequence and a shot sequence, if it sees two shots that are within this number, it'll treat them as one shot. So that could be good if you're using a source that is immediately cut to, and they've like zoomed in on it. The editor's repoted or something. It'll treat that as one shot for you. Yeah, when you showed me that, I almost had like an aneurysm. I mean, I struggled with that when I'm on my connected conform job. Yeah. And when you showed me this the other day, I was like, you know, maybe I should pay more attention to the things that they add to the preferences menu. Yeah. One more preference. When you're dealing with social media, stuff like one by one, nine by 16, you usually want to start off with just the edges cropped. And then you're going to repo it further. So make sure this timeline resize is set to crop edges unless you know you're going to let her box it or do something else. Yeah, so there's a few things that I thought you might want to set up. Before we get started, one more thing, I just remembered, I deal with AAF files from Avid editors. And when they use Photoshop files, Avid names Photoshop layers a certain way. And what we want to do is go into format options for PSDs, Photoshop. Photoshop, change the clip options to where the clip name is this one. That's how Avid names those. And if you import an AAF that's looking at a Photoshop layer, this will help you find it quicker and link to it quicker. Oh, that's a great tip. Okay, so let's actually do something. If you click save right there under Photoshop settings, does that then make that the default? That might make it the default. All right. Okay, so you ready to actually do some conforming? Yes, sir, dive in. This is a, I'm going to try to take you through as if we're doing it over a couple of days. This typically happens where we need to start finishing but we haven't finished the edit yet. Or we haven't colored yet but we got to start doing effects for it. So what typically happens with me is we do start working before we get color. The first day I get some prep for my editor. They typically give me a reference video. So this is what they are off-winding and how they see this spotlight. They also give me the same thing, but with burn in so I can tell the clip name and the source code in case something's wonky. And then the AAF. So I'll just drag all of those in and also a basic idea with connect to conform. Everything needs to live in a real group. And it could be a real group on the desktop or in a library, but the real group is kind of the structure that keeps the links together. I'm going to open up the reference and I'll put the burn in as another layer. I'm making a version of the AAF up there. Caller at me if any of this is going too fast. Hopefully everyone knows general conforming and we're going to get to the actual social media stuff pretty quick. So with the AAF, I typically go through and kind of just look at it and make sure I know what's going on. Something happened here. Somebody did a comp and didn't put their name on it. So I don't know where that came from. Let's figure that out. Here's something I did during offline and it has my initials on it. I know I did it and I have that saved in my offline effects that I did earlier. So I'll trash that because I'll replace that later. And that's typical with foam screens. The clients want to see them during offline. So we try to do the work to make it as easy as possible when we're actually finishing. It's already done in flame. We just replace the footage if they have updates to the screen and we do it here on top of what we've already done offline. But as far as conforming, I just get rid of those because I'm going to manually kind of put those in later. Okay, so it's pretty clean. I've locked the offline tracks and the audio track. When I go to conform, I have an option here to filter locked tracks. I just don't want to deal with those at all because I don't need to relink those or see them later. I like to limit handles. If you are doing batch groups, you'll see later, you really want to make sure you limit that. Batch effects, you don't have to as much. But I usually try to do that. Create sources sequence and I forgot one thing, delete these. So I just have that edit. I'm going to create the source sequence. I have one segment for each source used. If it's something that's used multiple times, it'll only be in here once. And using that preference that I had for how close to merge them, it'll make it one shot. And another thing about this job, kind of trying to show you how we can quickly update later, we're going to have to start doing effects work on the raw footage. Hey, Brian. I don't have the color yet. I have the raw footage. One folder here, I'll scan in there. Typically keep the match, the source timecode and file name. You might have to play around with that a little bit. Most things look like they're going to link. And a few things didn't link. And this is something you're always going to have to deal with. There's always going to be investigating and figuring out what's going on. When things aren't linking. This, there's that comp I was talking about. Somebody did that, and I'll have to go investigate that. And they put the raw footage on top of it. I'm going to just get rid of that for now and make a note. I feel like my keyboard is super loud. I'm sorry, Brian. Great question for you. Someone had a question. The, what was it that you skipped over or that you forgot that made that extra long segment that you went back and deleted? I had the reference, the offline reference still in here. Oh, okay. Gotcha. And it treated it as an edit. Gotcha. Yeah, it's a really important step that I've learned when doing the Connected Conform is before you go ahead and make your sources sequence, which is the list of all the sources. You need to go through what you get out of the AAF or the XML, the EDLs, and really clean it up. Get rid of things you know you don't need. Like you said, you had references to offline comps or maybe titles, sometimes they even throw in sound effects and anything that you're going to end up doing later anyway, clean out of there. So all that you're left with is one tidy sequence of just the segments that you need to do your shots. And typically my editors or their assistants are good about cleaning stuff up before they send it to me, but sometimes I'll get an edit where they just we're in a hurry and send it out and there's 20 layers with all kinds of stuff that is old cuts or old takes, you know, and I have to go through and clean it up. Another thing that's, I've put in actually a request to fix this or change this. Whatever you're sitting on when you hit create sources sequence or update, it puts the source sequence or the shot sequence in that reel. But I like to keep them in their own separate reels, so I'm constantly moving them back into this reel. I've put in a request to somehow say always put it back in the same reel. See if that happens sometime. Okay, so going through, we're still missing something. This is a phone screen. Can I recognize that from a previous job? So somebody grabbed that from an old job and was reusing it. So I'll have to go find that, hunt that down. And then one more thing is missing. It doesn't solve bad habits. Yeah. Yet. The intag, if I look at the form, sometimes I don't know why this happens, but my editors workstations to the network location has a capital Z and I need a lower case Z. So I'll just manually change that and it finds it and I can look to that. And you can see here, despite the editor's best efforts, they needed it to just freeze at the end. So they, looks like they copied and pasted it in our sources sequence. It didn't make two, you know, it only used it one time. So that kind of shows you how the sources sequence works. But I prefer still to treat it as one clip. So I'm going to time more and then just extend out the end of that. So it treats it as one segment there. Okay. So this thing, I went and dug it up and found it. So my editor used a comp that I did last year. One of these somewhere, there it is. So I'll just manually drop it in there. We'll have to figure out if it's the same timing. So the offline repo date or something. I'll figure that out later. So my edit now, everything's linked. I'm going to update sources sequence and the markers tell me something happened here. So if I go to that marker, but that was that previous spot pick up that they use and the marker says new segment. And then over here, the red segments are unused, the red markers. And those are those things that I trashed because I was saying, I'm just going to figure that out on my own screen. That's part of that. That's another thing. If you update a sources sequence and you've used other material in a BFX, it'll add it all in there too. Not just the kind of backplate. So I think those are just broken because I'm working from home and I didn't skip ahead from that for now. I'm glad you also made that distinction that when you generate your sources sequence or update your sources sequence, clips that are contained inside BFX segments are found and are accounted for. Yes. I know this was some kind of screen, phone screen capture. That's the tall kind of thing. And it added that to the sources sequence. So we've got our sources all good. Now we need to talk about shots. So doing the BFX method, what I would typically do next is, this is the raw footage of each shot. I'm going to copy that. And then I'm going to lock that bottom one. And this is because my clients like to do a lot of before after, you know, show me what I look like before. So I'm locking that down to be able to look at later. When I go to now make a shot sequence. This is the shot sequence. It'll put a track for every track or version you have, even though there's nothing in it. And you can see now we have the little link chain link. That means the chain link is in the actual edit too. So that segment can now be put in all different places and be resinked when you change it or do something to it. And you can- Another thing that I had to learn to understand was when a segment becomes connected, when it gets that little chain link there, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's connected to something else somewhere. It means that it can now be put in other places so you can easily sync them or update them across different cuts. Yes. And this whole method of making the shot sequence and the source of sequence I was saying earlier, you can just totally skip that if you want. Like, suppose I had an edit and I knew that only one shot was gonna get effects like. So let me back up and just undo making the shot sequence first. So if you don't wanna deal with shot sequence, you can just manually say create segment connection. And that adds the little chain link and that can now be linked other places. So you could totally do it manually that way and not ever deal with the shot sequence. Cool. Yeah, I've done that sometimes when I get an N tag from a client that's gonna be in five different spots. I'll just create that connected segment. And then I think I interrupted you. You were about to show the jump to connected segment. Yeah, so let me give you where I would create shot sequence. And now, if anything has a little chain link, I could right click jump to connected segment and see a list of everywhere that is instanced or used. And it's really great that it always gives you a, here's the longest version of it. So I've done this before too, where I have a 30 and a 15. I start doing work on the shot in the 15. And then I realize the 30 has 20 more frames on it. I gotta go put that down and do it. But if you always check this and go longest, work on the longest instance, it'll always, all the other instances will get that work too. So typically what we do next with the clients is we go through and make notes. And I like to do markers either on the timeline or on the segment, it kind of depends on the job. And just whatever the client says, you want that bottom blocked out. There's always little cleanup stuff. Is that your client right there? That's my four year old police car. Sure, it's your executive producer. Go through and make notes. Every screen, so many screens these days. Yeah, it's a great use of markers. So that's something, use of what? Of the markers to do like retouch notes or cleanup notes. That's a great, great use of that. And what I try to do is when the task is complete, I'll change it to green. Or if it's, you know, the feedback from the client, I'll change it to purple or something like that. And then I can quickly just look. Let me actually jump ahead where, so this just pretend this is a couple hours later. I've done some effects work, green means they're done, orange are still pending. And it's the end of the day and I'm going home. You work fast, man. I know, right? Just give me an idea for a feature request though. I'm gonna head over to, well, not, yeah, not to give it to Brian Bailey because you work so, you work so much faster than me, but I'm gonna head over to plain feedback and add a feature request for like a marker that links to shotgun. So we've been using shotgun. If I could get the status to change, but a market to change color based on the status and shotgun. Anyway, sorry. I made it without me. Yeah, that sounds great. Back to you. And another thing I'll do sometimes too, I've experimented with this is actually using the full segment marker. And there's a Python script for that. So you can make the marker the whole duration on the segment. And then if you're doing a posting for the client and some kind of feedback and burn metadata, you can use that color. That's a digression. We'll just, let's give it a, but anyway, we tested that out a little bit too. Cool. So it's the next day. It's Tuesday now. We've got the color in and I need to replace all the raw footage with the color footage. And this before connect to conform was a pain. You kind of do it shot by shot manually. But hopefully we can do it quicker now. I'm gonna look at my sources sequence. And since I've added some of those like phone screens and stuff, those are in my source sequence too. And that didn't happen automatically. I'm skipping ahead a day. I hope that's clear. I didn't mean to like infer that it just updated itself. But in looking at the sequences, I'm gonna look at the, even the things that are linked because when I'm relinking color footage, I don't wanna unlink stuff that's not, you know, those plates. So I'm looking at things that say raw and that's all I'm gonna say media. And I'm gonna search and where another color footage is. Scan there. And it found almost everything. Let's link those. And there's still something missing. As always, we've got to go investigate. Is this something that I want to tell you too? That's something I have. And after some investigating, I found out that the colors did go wrong. Take. Okay, so that's old. And he's busy and he's not gonna have time to color it. So I'm gonna have to do it. So that one, I'm gonna go back to the raw footage. Scan there. Relink it back to the raw again. And then I'm just gonna have to make a note on my editor. Okay, I'm not gonna edit the colors. So I'm gonna have to color too much. That's just another little thing I've dealt with a lot. We're always in such a hurry and that it's changed that the colors might do the wrong take or might do an old piece that we're using. And then I have to match his other shots that he is able to do because we don't have time to go back to him. Was that cool? That swapping out footage from raw that colored or if we got a new color version, you can do that. I don't know if people realize how easy that is now with these sources sequence. If I had a little edits, which I'll get to in a little bit. You would see that it would handle all the different edits for you too. Another benefit of connecting conform. Skipping ahead again. Let's say I've finished all the effects work. We have a beautiful 30 and it's two days later and I would need a 15. That happens a lot, right? Yes. And it's gonna be a perfect lift. My editor didn't change any shots. Okay. I did a spot last week. There were the first approved version of the cut was a nine by 16, 60. That was the first approved version. Yep, Mercury's in retrograde and we're all going to hell. Well, at least they, for me, they usually start with the 30 and get cut down to 15. We don't usually do 15s that develop on the 30s. Really good 15. Yeah. I've got the same thing from the editor again, a reference and a, I'm gonna put them in the same folder as my 30. Do the same thing I did before where I had the different things all into one edit. There it goes. And looking at the 15, I'm gonna walk those same tracks and just scan it real quick. Seems to be from the 30. I don't see anything new. Okay, this is new. This is kind of graphic, but then the 30. Okay, so this shouldn't be too bad. I'm gonna go back to my source of sequence again. And this time instead of create, I'm gonna update. It changed a little bit. And again, we've got those markers telling us something happened here. This is a new segment. So that was a texture I use in the effects. Yellow extended source head by one frame. So the editor use more heads on that shot. So I won't complain too much. There's not a left anymore. Brian, when that happens, when the update, when the update shows that a shot has been extended by like heads or tails, is that reflected in like batch groups or BFXs where that clip exists? Is that automatically, is it automatically extended for you or? It will when we do update the shot sequence. Okay. We're not to that yet. Gotcha. And I don't know if batch groups, I think you would have to manually do that with the batch group if you're using that route. That makes sense. There's a couple of other things here and I will kind of investigate this. That's the graphic that's new. If I look at the sources, I can tell again, that's one of those things where my editor's path is of capital Y and I need to lowercase Y. We should just clean that up on it. Okay. So those linked back up. There's new, something else in there that was some kind of reference I was looking at for that. Well, yeah, that was just a reference thing. I was looking at it. And you can kind of clean those up if you want. I typically just leave them, when I have like a reference in a BFX. The 15, also my editor named it something totally different. I like to keep the names consistent. If I know it's like left in the same spot. And if I go look at that 15 now, it has all those same sources linked. So we didn't have to manually go find all those. We didn't have to go back to the color footage folder. I just found them all when we did that sources update. I'm gonna do the same thing again that I did before where I copy this layer on the lower one. So we can do the before after stuff. And now I'll go back to the shot sequence. So I haven't updated it yet. These are all the shots in the 30. Let's do a update shot sequence. And you can specify the scope here of where it looks to see if it finds new shots. I typically use all sequence reels. I don't know what the cases would be where you would only wanna do it with the current reel or open sequences. If you know what you're doing and you're versioning up shots, maybe you would do that. When I hit update, here's a bunch of stuff that looks new. Marcus told me that's a new shot. Okay, but that's actually that. That'll pick up from the old spot. My editor reused that in the 15. That's that graphic. That's that new graphic. So it's treating that as a new shot. But here's that thing again where my editor had it in there twice to kind of repeat it. So it thought that was two shots. I will clean that up. Let's look at the 15. So it looks like he repeated that to hold it on the end, treat it like one shot. And then he did the same thing with the logo again. Does that make sense that I'm cleaning those up by using time marks instead of little segments? Yep. If I update shot sequence now, those second copies that had previously made, now it says it's unused because it's just using the one now. And that is something I like to trash and get out so I don't forget about it. And you can always move stuff around in the shot sequence. Like to keep it nice and clean. So we got 15 again. So it got all of those same chain links. If I right-click on one and jump two, I can see it's in the shot sequence, the 15 and the 30. There must be some difference in the ins and outs. There's my shot sequence as it's two or two. So I would want to do any more clean up work on the shot sequence. I wanted to make sure I cover everything. Thinking about that one heavy batch I had in there. Okay, so we've added our 15. And it got all the colored footage. Got all the shots with all the work already done. Is that impressive? Since everybody's doing that already with Connecticut Confluent. The crowd's going wild right now, man. Great. So now to actually get to the social media stuff because I don't know if this would be the exact order most people work, but we typically have like a 30 and a 15, they're 16 by nine and then the clients want to start doing Instagram versions. Well, not my client apparently. Yeah. My editor. Brian real quick, before we jump into the social stuff, just a couple of questions from people about what you've shown so far. The first is, is there a good number to set that source merge preference to in the preferences panel? It depends on, I don't know, it's how much you want to do effects work on handles if required, does that make sense? If it's like real heavy roto, you don't want to do a lot of work on in between frames. Yeah, I had an issue with it. Again, like I said to you, I didn't even know that that preference existed and what I found was like if the default is 24 and this goes out to Brooks, what I've been using so far is like it defaults to 24, make that double what your usual handles tends to be. So if you're doing 12 frames of handles, make that 24. I happen to be doing 25 frames of handles because it was before the color grade process. And if I had set that to 50, it would have caught a couple of shots that really needed to be one source as opposed to broken up. So maybe that's a rule to try is, double whatever your standard handles are gonna be. And then another question is, is there a way to change the default marker color? Or remember your last marker color? Each time you set a new marker, it defaults to blue. If you change it right here, that becomes your new color for everything that you make after that. Gotcha. So, okay, I have orange there. It's not really like setting a default. It's just, that's what we're gonna use until you change it again. Copy that. All right. Any more questions? Okay, so social media. My editors typically sit with the client and recall the shots. So they'll send me a reference. Sometimes they'll send the AAF, but usually it's simple enough to be pan and scan and I'll just die match it. So I'll drag those into my form reel. And my editors, in Avid, for them, it's easier to work 1920 by 1080 and put black on the sides. But I really prefer in flame to have the timeline be the size that we're gonna export. I don't know, that might be different for other people, but this is just simple for when you're exporting. You don't have to worry about resizing it on output. It'll work with when you're actually using 9 by 16, where it's 1920 tall. If you're doing 9 by 16 within an HD frame, then you're kind of cheating it down a little bit. So I'll take the editor's reference and resize it to actual 1080 by 1080 change. And I wanna show you one thing here. You have to do this resize with something like the reference video, as opposed to resizing your actual timeline. And the reason is, if I go to reformat on one of my actual edits, when I hit reformat, it's gonna tell me if you continue, all the existing connecting segments will lose their connection. And this is something I've asked about if we can get around that way to make that work better. But if you reformat that timeline, it's gonna break everything. But if you already have something that's that size you wanna go to, and then you copy and paste into it. So I'm just gonna take that whole, everything that's chain linked, copy. You could also do like edit over rights and paste. That does not break those links. So if I right click now and go to jump to connect segment, it's in the one by one, it's in the 30. So it's still linked to the version in the 16 by nine edit. Another thing I like to do is actually make another reel. And this is gonna be one by one. I'll change this to 16 by nine. They're probably here at the last minute. They need nine by 16 as well. Again, not my client apparently. Okay, so this is something that has been the biggest discussion I think on how to do social media stuff. I wanna be able to update effects or change things and have it ripple through to those different resolution sizes. So the effects what you have to do is I can change something in the actual BFX. And I'll do something dramatic so you can just see who want this to now be. So I'm parked on my 30 and 16 by nine. And I've changed that BFX and I want that to ripple through. But also in my one by one, I have a resize where, you know, they wanted him to be over here, but that's just in the one by one. If I sync this connected segment, it's gonna sync all the timeline effects. So if I go look at my one by one, I've lost that repo that I did. I'll undo that and show you what you can actually do is just sync the BFX. So if you right click on BFX, sync batch effect connected segment, and I'll hop over to the one by one. So it's updated the BFX, but it's left to resize. So that repo is still there. That makes sense? Yeah, that's the key right there. This is just to be conscious of what it is you're syncing. That was my one big con for using BFX segments. For social deliverables, you have to be careful to not sync the whole connected segment. So I'll jump ahead to where I've got my 16 by nines. Of course, we did nine by 16s and one by one. And the one by one, most shots have a little bit of a repo. So I gotta be careful if we change any effects, adjusting that BFX. Hey, Brian, can you select like multiple timeline effects and sync them all at once? Like BFX, Color Warper, or is it BFX? How granular can you get with what you sync? Let's see. I'm typically doing like everything I can in the BFX. I'm not doing it as a timeline effect. So I usually just have like BFX and resize. But I wonder if I sync selected effects. So you can do that, except that it won't let you control select BFX and something else. Got you. The resize and the color correct I can. So does that answer your question? It's like BFX is a special case, but other ones you can. Yep, cool. Thank you. And thank you, Jeff. So I feel like that was a lot of build up to get to how I handle the social deliverables. Let me jump over to how I would do it in batch groups. So back to, all the way back to you. This is all from having to switch to work at home. But I'm just gonna try. We all know it well, man. I tried to set up home as close to work, network paths and everything that I could. Some of them got broke. I'll do it this way. Okay. So back up all the way to where we just move. Okay, so I've got my segments all connected sources. I haven't done that. Create shot group yet. But I'm gonna create the shot sequence. But with batch groups, one thing you have to do, batch group has to have a shot name. So I'll do just simple shot name. And now they have that. There's a segment name, but then there's also a shot. And with that shot name update, or create shot sequence, and it didn't have that lower one you want. You walk it. So now it's done the same thing with the chain links. Still the same as what we were doing with VFX. But now instead of just going and starting working VFX, I'm gonna select everything and create batch group. Hey, Brian, one question from the chat here while that's rendering. As far as doing your pan and scans, is there a benefit to using resize versus adding an action timeline effect? I think resize is typically faster if you're not doing any scale. And I feel like my editor is usually just left and right, you know, pan and scan. If there is something that's zoomed in or looks like it needs more adjustment then I'll go to action instead of resize. So when I did that create batch group, now on my desktop I have a batch for each shot. Go to batch and look at them. It's set me up with the source file, the render node, the render node that's smart replace on here. That render will automatically get slugged into the timeline. And that is a source now that is underneath any other soft effects or batch effects you do. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, the smart replace when it comes back to me, it goes underneath any timeline effects that you did. So if you had a scale or a color correct or something and then you re-rendered shot one, that same stuff will be applied to the new render shot one. So I'll do my crazy color correct on that shot again. This is my absolute favorite way to test these things, by the way is the crazy color, crazy color correct. And also this was one of those things I was saying about the batch group. It's starting on frame 1001, but it's including handles of what's in the timeline. If I click on the source here, you can see the white little ins and outs of the actual segment. So this is where if you're doing this batch group method, you really wanna limit those handles. If you think you're not gonna have to do any handle work later, you can make it zero or just a couple frames, but now you're gonna either have to do the work in those handles or you can manually change the render frames on that render node if you wanna just render what's currently in there. But I think you just have to do that manually. I don't know the way to automatically not consider handles when making a batch group. So there's my crazy color, I'll render that quickly. While that renders, hey, Mori, just one other note about the resize for pan and scans. When my editors, some of my editors use Avid and when the editor switched to using frame flex for their repositions, those get translated in the AF to flame resizes. And so once I started getting pan and scan stuff out of Avid that was using resize, I just naturally started using resize as a way to keep it consistent. I think that's, I don't know what effect they're using in Avid, but most of them come in good for me too. The main thing I have to deal with is they're using dailies that are HD and then if I have a 4K plate, you still have to go into the action that the AAF created and put a 50% scale on it. It's still typically winds up pretty good. Yeah, we've tried to enforce the rule of full size dailies. The dailies can be a lower bit rate, it can be a lower quality image, but the scale should match whatever was shot. I'll let you know how that goes. Okay. Everything we have gotten the last couple of years is either UHD or 4K. And those are pretty easy for me to drop a scale in on. There's some red formats that I really hate. Okay, so I rendered that and it automatically replaced what was in my timeline there. And the benefit of batch groups for social media is that I don't have to worry about blowing away my resize if I seek to segment. So if I do something else here on the timeline, like every size, and I haven't made my one by one yet, hopefully this makes sense. When I need to do more work in that batch, that'll all come in underneath whatever I'm doing on the timeline. And if I have a 30 and a 15, a one by one, a nine by 16, I can just hit, I don't even, I don't have to hit same connected segments because the batch group has gotten done automatically in their place. You're client again. They want to make a change to the four by five, right? That was really loud. I didn't think it was that loud. I've got a four year old. We're all working from home, man. I'm wondering what I'm doing. I'm gonna put some WD-40 on that. Yeah, three in one oil on that, on the hinge. So that was really quickly going through batch groups. I know we're running long, but I wanted to kind of show both methods. Did I explain both far enough? I think so. I've got a question for you here. How do you work around the fact that after you create batch groups, all of your sequences are now on a new version? You're hearing Brian respond emotionally right now through his four year old about this very, very challenging thing. Charlie, be quiet, please. And because you asked so nicely, your child will cooperate, I'm sure. Okay. When it makes that second version, it doesn't have to stay there. I can make it track and move them. So like, I typically do move it down like that so I can do before or after with the clients. But yeah, when it makes that another version, it doesn't have to live there. I can move anywhere. More questions? Anybody have any other questions for Brian? Brian, how many spots do you deliver a week, would you say? Or what is your average, you have like this is Home Depot. How many different versions do they hit you with on your average task? Home Depot does so much, 30s, 15s, English, Spanish, and then all of those might have five or six different offers at the end. So finishing a spot typically means 30 or 40 deliverables. Yeah, I'm looking at this. You can totally see the benefit of this workflow. Here's another project I'm working on. There's 12 spots. Each one has a 30, a 15, a six. Each one is 16 by nine and each one is one by one. So that's 60 deliverables. And there's a lot of just at the last minute, hey, we need to paint out that hair flying away. And I don't remember which spots it's in. I don't have to worry about it as long as I can find it in one spot. Yep, with that kind of volume, you can totally see the benefit of the reconnected conform workflow. Anything that can eliminate, either save the time or eliminate the chance that one of those 5,000 versions is not gonna have your updated shot. One more question. And also even just for, we're doing more and more finishing while they're still editing. So I try to be conscious of setting everything up and offline to re-link as quick as possible when we have to do online. Because I forget about online and the client approves the offline edit and says, can we ship it tonight? Because they don't remember that we have to finish. Right, I don't know, can we? One more question for you, man. You're using library editing. Is that, are you doing that as a personal preference? Like living in the library versus the desktop. Is that a personal preference? Yeah, working with the desktop, I just feel like there's a lot more loading and loading, moving to the libraries. If it's just already in the library, then I can just work from there and not have to manage the desktop. And I use the desktop as kind of a scratch pad where to throw stuff just for a minute. But also that reminds me, you do have to be careful if you pull something out of a real group, that'll break its connection. That the real group is a real kind of container for things that are connected. So if I had something connected in this edit and I copy it to the desktop, that copy on the desktop does not show up in my jump to connected because it's in a different real group. Gotcha, yeah, that is another good thing to know about the connected form workflow is that there's a relationship, like you said, with real groups or with sequence reels and things like that, that just needs to be paid attention to. Anybody have any other questions for Ryan? Oh, I'm sorry, I cut you off. Do you have one more thing too? Shoot, go ahead. With the kind of like English version and Spanish version? Say I just copy this or duplicate the edit. This is going to be English and this is going to be Spanish. So I've already done my English version, but the Spanish version has a different end card with Spanish. So that segment is linked in both edits. But if I go to the Spanish one and I duplicate connected segment and you can set the scope all different kinds of ways depending on what you're doing. And I just want to do it in this one sequence and I can say duplicate or replace. So if I replace and apply, it doesn't look like anything happened, but that little chain link is now its own thing. It's separate from the English one and I can replace it with the Spanish one. Let me undo that. And then if I do duplicate and instead of replace duplicate and apply, it adds a copy on top. And now the bottom one is still linked to the English version. And now this is its own Spanish version. So this is the way I do a lot of forking off into those different offers. All the offers have English and Spanish versions. That's great, man. One more question for you from the Q&A. Do you find that you choose BFX or batch connected conform based on the edit? Or do you have a preference? Like if you settled into one versus the other. I think like I said, the main thing is if I know it's an effects heavy project, every shot's gonna get lots of effects work. If I'm sharing shots with other artists, then I will do the batch groups so that I can manage that better. This home depot type of stuff, it's usually clean up a little bit of work on each shot. And I'll just do the batch effects. Gotcha. All right. Anything else for Brian? Well, I just wanna say thank you, man. Thank you so much for taking us through this. And I happen to know, because I've known you for a while, that you've been kind of the, you've been a champion of the connected conform workflow for a long time. And we're one of the early adopters. And thank you so much for like, always giving your feedback back to the team, the dev team, because that's the only way we get these changes in the software that we want. So as my weekly message to everybody it seems, if you do have a feature request, if there's something that you'd like to see or that you don't like how it works, definitely head on over to Flame Feedback and make the comment there as the fastest way to get it addressed. So I'm just going to- Yeah, and hit me up on the Logic Facebook too, if there are any questions. Well, thanks, man. Yeah, if anybody has any questions for Brian, please go ahead and find him on Logic. I'm gonna paste into the comments or the chat window here, the registration links for our upcoming sessions. Brian, if you wouldn't mind stopping your screen share. Oh, you know, actually, before you do that, I got one more question for you from the Q&A. It says here, sometimes reformat scales things wrongly. Oh, you mean like, Terri, you mean when rescaling something on the desktop, or reformatting rather on the desktop? Is that, I think you might be talking, referring what you were mentioning too, but you referred to Brian was, if you reformat something like a timeline that has segments in it, you're gonna, you could end up with problems as opposed to doing like a straight up clip. What's the question? But if you reformat a timeline? Some says here, sometimes the reformat scales wrongly for me. How stable is it for you? When I'm just doing those offline clips, like from the editors, those work great. The, if you reformat an actual edit, I think I know what you're talking about. Sometimes the resizes get changed weird. Yeah, I think if you like, if you right click on that whole sequence and reformat it there, you're dealing with, you're trying to apply one thing to a lot of different options, a lot of different segments and clips that all have their own, maybe individual timeline effects. I think it also matters if that preference is set to like fill, it'll try to fill. Oh, sure, right. If it's set to fill versus crop. Yeah, I just reformatted this timeline and because I had that center crop preference, I think they all behaved. Yeah. All right, well, Brian, thank you very much. I put in the chat the registration links for the next two logic live sessions. So if you haven't signed up already, please do. Next Sunday, June 7th, we're gonna do silhouette paint with Boris FX and we're gonna have two presenters from Boris. There's gonna be Ross Shane, who's gonna be giving the demo and then Marco Peolini, who is the developer for Silhouette. If you happen to have a chance to check out Silhouette Paint, please join us. It's gonna be, it's a really great piece of software and it's now available in plug and form and Boris FX is gonna be giving away a one license of Silhouette Paint to one lucky attendee. So you can't win if you don't play. So please be sure to tune in next week. That's gonna be followed on June 14th by Resolve for Flame Artists with David Johns. Then on June 21st, Advanced Flame Techniques with Nikon Stepanyan. Definitely looking forward to that. And on June 28th, Joel Osis, the man in the myth, the legend. I'm hoping that for next week, I'll be able to give you the lineup for July. We've got some great things planned for logic live throughout the summer. You'll be able to find this episode and all the previous episodes up on Logic TV. And please be sure to subscribe to the YouTube group or the YouTube channel rather. And thank you again to Synasys for their continued support of the Flame community. Synasys Oceana Solutions integration and support for digital content creators. Check them out at synasys.io. That's it for logic live this week everybody. Thank you so much, Brian. And thank you everybody for tuning in and we will see you all next time.