For better or worse, high-end feature films and television still follow an offline/online model, cutting with some kind of lower-res proxy and conforming a higher-res original. The dirty little secret of our new file-based workflows is that despite the many advances we’ve seen, conforming is still a pain in the butt. Why? Because no conforming system can fully conform Avid effects. Sure, cuts and dissolves can be handled easily, but more often than not, effects work has to be painstakingly rebuilt by eye. That seems downright crazy to me — in the wonderful, all-digital, file-based workflow of the future, people are still studying the locked cut, figuring out what the heck was done, and reconstructing it by eye.
Yes, there are exceptions. If you do your offline in Media Composer and finish in Avid Symphony, everything comes across. That’s a wonderful thing and if you work that way, you become dependent on it quickly. But unless you color correct in Symphony, you’re going to have to export, which means baking in a look and accepting a maximum raster size of HD video. On the Final Cut side, the XML export format opens the door to full conforms, but even then, in many DI environments you still don’t get everything.
I had a chat with a product marketing person at one of the DI system manufacturers recently, and I asked him why. His answer surprised me. His view is that we editors don’t care — we expect and have no problem with a by-eye conform. That might have been true once, but not today. Once you start doing complex effects work and see it conformed perfectly with little or no effort, you start wondering why things should work any other way. And you start to chafe at all the behind-the-scenes effort expended by editors and assistants, just trying to get back to something that worked just fine in the offline editing room.
This is a long-standing, Tower-of-Babel problem — there is no standard effects language. And it seems that each manufacturer has their own selfish reasons for not spending the money needed to make really good translations possible. That was tolerable in the days of film and HD, but in the all-digital present, it seems more and more anachronistic to me.
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