The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP007: Conform, Bake, or Hybrid?

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

One of the biggest questions in any color grading pipeline is how a project will be moved from editorial to a grading system (assuming it's not edited in the same application!)  In this episode of The Offset Podcast, Robbie & Joey discuss the pros & cons of three different workflows for moving projects to color: conform, bake (also called flat file), or a hybrid of the two. No two projects are the same, and learning to figure out the best workflow to move a project from editorial to color is an essential skill to have. 

Hey, I'm Robbie Carmen, and welcome back to the Offset Podcast. This week, we're taking a look at a common question that we often get from clients, whether to do a conform, bake, or hybrid workflow. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color-accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs.

Learn more at flanderscientific.com. All right, Joey. So today we are talking a little bit about the best sort of, you know, kind of handoff workflow from a client to, you know, to finishing and to color correction. I suppose this could be germane to some audio workflows too, but we're primarily talking about, obviously, what's in our wheelhouse and color correction. And really, you know, we have this conversation, I mean, pretty much daily with clients about kind of the best way to hand off. a project from editorial, from, you know, from their side over to us and to, and to do, you know, final finishing and color correction. And I think this is, you know, this is a question that, or, you know, kind of a concept that hits home for a lot of people, because some people have

very kind of like firmly held beliefs about, like, the air quotes, right way to do this. And I think that, you know, we've obviously done all three of these workflows that we're about to talk about. But I want to just kind of riff in this podcast a little bit about the pros and cons of each, when we would suggest doing one or the other, any pitfalls that we experience with these workflows. So let's start off with the one that I think is the traditional color correction workflow one. And I'm saying traditional in the sense of modern color correction because back when I was coming up on the Da Vinci Days and tape machines, this was not the workflow. We'll get to that part in a second. But these days,

what everybody kind of considers the standard workflow, and that is the conform workflow. So walk us through a little bit what the conform workflow is, what it means, and some of your pros and consens. Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about different kind of workflows, whether it's big, conform, whatever, basically what we're talking about, like you mentioned, is how do we get from edit to final finishing, including the edit itself and all the elements the colorist needs to do the final finishing. So the image assets,

graphics, if the color is going to be marrying graphics, final mixes, all of these things kind of come into the overall workflow equation. What I usually tell people is there is no best way, right? It's kind of like asking how much is a boat? You know, that's kind of my

general response to these. What's the best way? Well, how much is a boat? The answer is always a resounding it depends. So, like you said, conforms are very common. And what a conform is conceptually is taking a metadata-based set of information, which is your edit list, or an edit decision list, sometimes in an EDL file, sometimes in an XML file, sometimes in a

project file, like a Premier Project or a Resolve project. But the point is, this piece of information has no actual image data with it, but it tells you what shots go at what times and what cuts, transitions, dips, fade. It's the recipe. It's a set of instructions, right? Exactly. And that set of instructions can come in various formats, and then you have a set of actual images,

whether they be individual frames and image sequences, whether they be individual QuickTime movies, whether they be graphics files, whatever. You have a big set of actual image media and the metadata to put it together. Now, this is sometimes lumped in with what we call online editing, sometimes not. And this is where a lot of confusion can happen because most big projects today are still done in some kind of offline way, right?

Where the editor is working with lower res than the final resolution formats or the camera originals to make those edit decisions. And then before color, it needs to get to full res. So we can now split our conform workflow into two conform workflows, right? Do you, A, up res to get all of your full res sources, or if the editor was editing full res, you don't need to do that step, and then you need to get it into your color correction application. So that's kind of where the conversation usually starts with me with a client talking about it conform. Who's doing the upres? Where is it happening? And where is the source media, right? Because if they were offline editing and they send us the offline proxy media and the edit decision recipe media and the edit decision. be that gives us nothing, right? We can't just link to the proxy media and grade from that.

We're going to get a bad result. So in that case, it's a conversation with the client, right? Do you want us to do the upres or do you want to have your editors do the upres and then send us, for example, an XML and the camera original media or an XML and a consolidated version of your project that you already did the upres on? And there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these. Obviously in the case of having the client, do the upres, the advantage on our side is it's less work for us. The disadvantage is, and also that can be an advantage on the client side too, because it can be a way for a client to save money. Double check things too. That's obviously billable time for us. We're not going to throw in a full upres of your film for free. It's usually a point that we can kind of talk about budget-wise.

But if a client wants to save money, that's a quick, easy way that we can get them a meaningful money saving immediately when we're bidding the project of, well, why don't you do your own up-res and then send us a consolidated project. But they might not be equipped to do that, whether it be computer issues or storage or where their editor is located, whatever. So that's kind of step one, getting it all up-resed. Step two is then getting it all into your color correction system, DaVinci Resolve in our case. Now, if we're doing the Upres, we can do that in Resolve or we can do that in the NLE. It kind of depends on the layout of the... the project.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I know that's a lot of word salad there about the forums, but. It don't make sense. I just want to give some context for people who might, the first part of that conform workflow, because I think the offline, online thing is a workflow. And honestly, terminology that is kind of faded from fashion a little bit. You know, when we were coming up in the industry, you know, that conform thing was a big deal, right?

People were cutting that, not just like, I wouldn't even call it what we'd. consider proxies today. I would call it like thumbnails basically. Yeah, avid AVR3, which was very common, and it was single field 320 by 240. Right. Right. JPEG. Right, exactly. So, you know, early in my career, I spent a lot of time running back and forth back to the tape room with a project that I was, you know, okay, here's the tape number, okay, here's the batch list, go into the tape room with that, with that tape, pop it in, and the computer, you know, would go out and say, okay, I need time code X, Y, to X, Y, Z, you know, to X, Y, Z, and it would pull those shots back to whatever your new capture resolution was, and that typically happened in a more expensive room, a more...

Yeah, and that was, you know, in the case of linear, or sorry, non-linear online. Yeah. When I started, we were doing linear online. We would have the tape decks assemble the final time codes from the EDL on a floppy disk. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that's, that brings up an important point when you're dealing with conform workflows, Whether you are onlining in tape 30 years ago, whether you're onlining from tape in a non-linear editor,

whether you're onlineing from proxies to full-res camera originals on modern digital cinema cameras. Because everything revolves around that metadata, you need absolutely good practices from the beginning of the project to maintain that information. So when you're offlineing, whether you're working with proxies or whatever, or low-res camera sources, some cameras record their own proxies,

You need to make sure that the metadata in your editor is staying in place. That means you have accurate time code and you have accurate, we used to call them tape names. Now most software calls them real names, which is essentially the file name that it's coming from. And there's a lot of places where this can go wrong, right? You can have time codes that are wrong. You can have sources that the editor said, okay, well, you know, this was a 59-94 source. I'm going to interpret it as 2398. that kind of stuff doesn't really go into the XML very correctly in most cases.

So you have edit lists that are wrong with that. Or sometimes it doesn't bring in the file name correctly. The big one that gets me often is that Adobe Premiere can read a timecode hint from a quicktime file, which is basically the start time code, right? I'm sorry, not a quick time file, an MP4 file. MP4 files can't have timecode tracks. So when Premiere brings it in, if the camera recorded, hey, my start time is 14-01-2205. Right, it will set that as the first frame and then extrapolate the time code for the rest of the clip.

Most finishing software, resolve, baselight, et cetera, doesn't do that. It says, hey, you have no time code track? This clip starts at zero. Totally. So I think that's, you know, that kind of like, you know, history about how that came about, I think is an important part, especially as, Because people, I think in general, people who are considering conform workflows, one of the major reasons that they're doing that is to get back to the highest quality possible source in general, right? Whether that be raw material, whether that be 444, you know, pro res or, you know, whatever it is. So that is a step.

I, after that step, regardless of whether we're handling it or our clients are handling it, you know, the other part of that step is the, the collect. in a conform work flow, as you said, is the collection part of things, right? And I like to think about conforming as, like, a rebuilding process. I say it's a clients all time, right? That, like, they have, well, what's a conform work? Well, it's basically rebuilding your timeline

over in our pieces of software, right? Because you have to think about it like this, that the, there's no, unfortunately, there's no universal timeline. There are people who were working for it, like Open Timeline I.O. Which, by the way, open timeline I.O., was now implemented in Resolve,

is the first major in LE to implement open timeline I. And I love that. I love open standards in the industry. Because when we say XML, we're acting like XML is some standard. No, XML is just a container format like QuickTime. What's in there is application specific. And it usually goes back to programs like Premiere or Resolve

emulating Final Cut 7 XMLs. There's no standards. Totally. So, you know, I think that because, you know, we're redoing this rebuilding process, when we conform. One thing that's important to understand is that, you know, you pointed out things like time code, but also there's a lot of other things in a conform workflow that two applications don't do the same kind of thinking. They don't do the same kind of math, right?

So there are challenges, even in, let's just say you had a perfect conform, you know, perfect upres in your NLE, right, and you reconnected everything and everything's great. Now it's time to hand off to say resolve. That is still fit with a lot of problems because besides time code issues, there's things like speed changes, coordinates for frame sizing, you know, how effects are handled, how things of that nature. So until there is, as you said, sort of an open standard that everybody uses for Timeland Translation, we're going to have this challenge when we move from one piece of software to another piece of software in that rebuilding process where things think slightly different, right?

And I think the challenges that I always like to tell people about a conform workflow are, are, hey, look, speed changes can be challenging. Framing changes can be challenging. Speed and turpulation can be a problem, right? Like the difference between how one piece of software does, you know, nearest or frame blend versus how the other one does a frame blend. Coordinates are a big one that screws everybody up, right? So there's a lot of challenges like that. Now, we, you know, so that we've kind of covered that basic idea of conforming, moving and rebuilding with an instruction set and a set of media.

But what we haven't covered is how to create that set of media. It's going to depend on your NLE, right? In most NLEs, there is a consolidate function or a media managed function, right? So you have your final picture lock timeline that, you know, maybe the editor did the upres themselves. But you need to hand that off. So you're handing off the extraction file that you spoke about. But there's two parts of this. If everything is online, upres, etc., in the NLE timeline, the offline timeline, the offline timeline,

Then it's just consolidating, creating a folder of media that accompanies that instruction set. The part that's a little confusing to people is when we talk about, oh yeah, we'll do the up-res too. And they're like, well, how are you going to do the up-res? Well, in that case, what we have to do is we get the instruction file, but we also often get giant hard drives of media with everything on it for that project. And that can be, I mean, I'm not joking. People walk in sometimes with like, here's my 25-terabyte drive. and you're like, oh, well, we're not going to move 25 terabytes. So part of that process for us, too, if we're doing the up-res back to the original cameras,

is that we do that conform by first loading the instruction set over and resolve, right, and figuring out what's what, you know, real numbers, time code, make sure a lot of kind of stuff loose, and then we're reconnecting to that high-res media. But here's a little nuance about it. And I hear people trying to, you know, oh, I had to wait, you know, three days to transfer 30 terabytes of media. I just want to set up people, don't do that. right? The best thing to do is load that instruction file, reconnect to that media on your external client big drive, right?

And then have your color correction software like Resolve, do the media management from there. So you're only transferring or only media managing what's actually used on the timeline, not that 30 terabytes on your client's hard drive. Yeah, and I usually do that from my assist station because I don't plug the client drive directly into the network or anything like that.

I keep that kind of separate. But the idea is, one, we don't want to copy every single thing off of a client drive. We want to copy just what we need. But also, we don't want to work directly off the client drive because that's a liability, right? The drive could die. The drive could not have the same performance as our network attached storage. We're not going to be able to do a final archive at the end if we're working right off the client drive. You know, we like to get, once we're past that conform process, get everything onto our storage that we need.

And then just disconnect the client drive and keep it on a shelf until we, we're ready to give it back. Totally. So the, you know, people say, well, what's the advantage of doing a conform workflow? It sounds like a lot of work. It can be a lot of work. And there's a reason, by the way, that if you go to big facilities and big studios, there are people, if you ever look, you know, ever stick around at the end of the movie and watch, watch the credits of a movie, there are people that are, you know, they're either labeled finishing artist, finishing editor, conform artists, right? This can be a process, especially in the multi-delivery world that we now exist in where you need 30 versions of things.

It can happen most of the time ahead of time before finishing, but sometimes there's an after part of it too, handling the various outputs and stuff. But to me, why I would insist on a conform workflow, mainly there's kind of like three, maybe four reasons that I insist on that. One, some people just have it in their head that this is the air quotes again, right way to do it. That's fine.

I'm not going to change those people's minds. even if it's something simple and cut to cut and it's not whatever, you know, crappy sources, they still want to do it that way, fine. But for me, the big overrising reason, do you have raw media in your timeline, right? Do you have red, R.E., black magic, cannon, whatever? If you have a lot of raw media, that raw data can only be preserved in a true conform workflow. We'll talk about bakes in a second. But if you make an intermediate file, you have lost that raw access to that raw data

and the controls that it has, right? And there are ways around that we'll talk about in a second, but that's number one. Number two, I need handles. We're not locked. We're not sure what we're, you know, this might move a little frame. We want some flexibility. Maybe it's also flexibility in things like sizing, right? I have 8K footage and I put it on a 4K timeline, but I need some extra, you know, ability to pan.

I'm not fine all that stuff. If you need to do any sort of massaging of positioning or massaging of, you know, things like speed changes, that kind of stuff. That is a real overriding reason to do a conform workflow. And then third, the reason I think a conform workflow is valid for a lot of projects, is that it allows to kind of remove this, kind of goes with the number one thing, but this invisible shadow of we're not doing it at the highest quality, right? And I don't know how to fight that sometimes because even colleagues of ours are like, oh, you're doing a baked workflow, whatever.

But you're not going to get better than the camera sources, right? So it kind of removed, okay, we're going back to the original kind of thing. So it allows some flexibility there. If your timeline doesn't have raw media, doesn't have a lot of positions or sizing or speed changes that you need a massage, you don't need handles, right? There isn't an overwhelming reason, in my opinion, to do a true conform workflow. We'll get to the alternate for that in a second. Now, can I add one more plus to the conform workflow? is you do have much more rich metadata

to assess things with. So if you have a complicated color management situation where you have 17 different cameras and maybe you have lots of different locations and you need to be able to sort your edit list or your timeline by what the camera take is. So basically you can do what's called a C mode sort where you sort by the source names

and that'll give you all of your interviews in one big bunch. And you can look at the camera metadata and say, oh, this was a Sony. It was shot in S-log 3. Totally. You know, it can make your color management tasks much, much, much easier. Even something as simple as, like, the file name, like, it can be pretty easy to identify.

Like, you know, we were talking before we recorded this about, like, color coding clips and resolve, right? And, like, that's really easy to do. Like, you could go, oh, I can see this is all red. I'm going to select them all, make those, you know, pardon the pun, I'm going to make all those clips red. Or this is all canon, I'm going to make them great. Like, you're absolutely right about that. There's a lot more embedded metadata that comes along with clips rather than make an intermediate file. And we do all our color management node-based in general, so we do have to kind of manually assign input color spaces.

But if you're set up for project-based color management, the conform is great because guess what, it takes some metadata right from the clip and sets your input transform automatically. Totally. Now, the downsides, I think, are implied here. It's more time, potentially rife with some difficulties in terms of translation between editorial and whatever. I think there are certain types of projects that we're going to generally go for a conform usually as the first step. That's going to be feature narratives, right? Because most of the time feature narratives, they're actually shot on a single camera or maybe just a couple cameras.

They're easy to keep track of. They don't have a lot of, you know, a ton of speed changes, a ton of extra things that can make your life difficult. Something that we're not going to do a conform on is like, Oh, well, I shot, you know, this, you know, this ad, this 30-second ad on my iPhone, like, what's the point, right? Like, there's no, you know, there's really no point to do that. So that brings me to the next step. Let's talk about the bake workflow. Some people call it a bake.

Some people call it a flat file workflow. I'll just give some context to why I often go to this workflow and why I think that I've become a little, a little well-known as the bake workflow advocate, right? Okay, so when I learned, when I was coming up in the industry and starting to learn color corrected, it was just like you, it was tape-based days. And in a tape-based workflow, guess what? That's a flat file, right? You have, you know, you have a file that's coming off a tape, you're color-correcting it,

and, you know, you're maybe recording it to the other side, or maybe you get a master that's been laid back to tape, and then you just need to notch that master and then be able to grade the whole thing, right? So that's kind of the origins for me of the flat, baked file workflow, is kind of tape-based days of either a master program that's notched. By the way, just for those of you don't know what I mean by notch, same thing as cut up, slice up, make add edits, right, to where the clips are. So whether it was a master tape that I'm notching or cutting up,

or whether I'm doing color correction by source, right? I'm loading in a tape, color correcting those five shots, and then putting them back to tape where they begin, right? I think for a lot of projects, especially as we see, budgets on a whole do this kind of thing, right? And we say to somebody, listen, it's going to take us three days to do a conform, right? None of your sources have time codes, so we have to eye-match all of it. All of your, everything's been repositioned. So we like all the factors that we just spoke about that, we can often turn to clients and say, hey, do you have raw material on your timeline? No,

don't. Do you have a need for handles? No, no handles needed. Okay, are you happy more or less with the way that things are framed in size? Yeah, that's good, right? We're making more work for ourselves in those situations if we say, let's do it conform, right? And we're charging them more money, which depending on you look at it is a good thing or a bad thing.

So in those situations, a flat file workflow or a baked workflow is a good thing. As far as I'm concerned, now, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the particulars of what that means for the client and making a baked floor? Like, what do they do to make that happen?

Yeah, so essentially they're handling an output from there in L.E. of a full-res, up-res timeline with things like stabilization, sizing, speed warps, all baked in. Now, the first question that always comes up is, well, I have some dissolves. How does that work?

In general, dissolves work pretty good in a baked workflow. We add a cut right where the dissolve is, match the length of dissolve, so we're essentially dissolving one color correct to another color correct. In almost all cases, that works really, really well.

Where it gets a little hairy is if you're going from a log shot to a REC-709 shot so you have a vast difference in source color space. Sometimes those dissolves don't work well and that's one of those factors that we look at to go with a conform versus a bake.

But let's say it's a traditional show almost all cuts, shot on REC-709 or even log sources, but not shot with red raw files or R-E-Raw files or Sony-Raw files. So they have, in their timeline, the highest quality we're ever going to get. Which in the case of most non-raw digital cinema cameras is a 10-bit log high-resolution file.

Right? As long as we're exporting to a bigger container or equally sized container as their biggest source, we're not losing any quality. So, for example, they shot everything on Sony in XAVC with a particular bit rate at 10-bit, right? If we have the client export a 10-bit ProRes 444, which is a higher bit rate than their camera source was. Yes, there's a little bit of encode and decode happening there, but it's at such a high level of quality. It's completely imperceptible. The biggest thing to keep in mind is you've got to maintain, if you're dealing with log sources especially, you've got to maintain color precision through this pipeline.

So we say bit depth and bit rate. Bit rate is how much information we're throwing at each frame. Bit depth is how much information we're throwing at each pixel. So if you have a log image as your source, you've got this entire dynamic range compressed into a small area, right? We have to expand that out in the color grading process. So if we don't have a lot of gradation from top to bottom, 8 bit gives you 0 to 254 levels of precision between white and black, right?

10-bit gives you a thousand-twenty-three. Which one would you rather have? So it's very important to maintain 10-bit through that baked process because that's where you can, that's where that low quality can come into play, right? The client could be like, well, hey, I've got all my high-quality sources in here. I sent it to you, you color-rated it, and now it looks crap, there's banding, there's problems. So I was going to say the banding thing is, so, I mean, I dealt with that this past week. We had a client that outputed a file, and it was a lot of, like, close,

close-ups on people's faces. And you could see, like, on the side of their cheeks, there were some, like, chroma banding, like little pink blocks and stuff like that. They're exporting from Premiere, didn't go through the pipeline steps to ensure a 10-but export, and I was getting banning.

Asked them to re-output 10-bit with the various settings. And sure enough, that banding just disappeared. Yeah, and that's where communication with the client is really paramount, because this depends on your NLE, right? Premiere has made it kind of difficult over the years to maintain 10 bit. You need to set your timeline to a higher bit depth. Then you need to set your export to a higher bit depth.

And you need to export to a format that allows for a higher bit depth. Avid, similar problem. But since Avid manages its own media, they need to make sure they upres everything to a higher bit depth format. Now, Avid, it's easy because all the Avid formats that are 10Bit have an X at the end. D&X 175 is 8.5. DNX 175X-X-10-bit. 10-bit.

D-N-X-H-R-H-Q is 8-bit. D-N-X-H-R-H-Q-X is 10-bit. Whereas pro-res is always 10-bit, but you can have 8-bit data inside of it. So on an avid file on DNX, you can look at the file metadata say, oh, this is 8-bit, this is 10-bit. Quick, pro-res, you can look at a file say,

hey, this is a 16-bit file. But guess what? All the pixels in there are just 8-bit. Yeah, totally. So in a conform, So as you said, one of the things is, you know, we're up to the editor to make those decisions. So one of the things I always stress, it doesn't matter if it's short form or long form, is that it is a requirement that the clients go through that timeline with, you know,

a microscope to make sure that things are the way that they want them in how they, how they look, how they feel. And that can be a lot of things, you know, from transitions to composites, et cetera. like we want that stuff to be right. Now, one of the things about a baked workflow that I think is implied, but we should just state to be clear here, is that in a baked workflow, we do not want any sort of color correction,

lookup table, transform, any of that kind of thing baked into that file, right? So like if you were, you know, you're adding to show and everything's log and, you know, whatever, EP edit network goes, I can't look at this, it's all log. And so you put a base correction, you know, temp correction on it to, you know, get through the approval process, that needs to be stripped off the file before it goes to color, because we want to, again, we're not going back to the camera originals, but to your point, about 10-bit and best file possible, we don't want those things baked in because they limit

what you can do in final color, right? And that, you know, people are like, oh, well, it's just, you know, simple as going through and, you know, removing filters. That's true. But a lot of NLEs these days are trying to be smart and how they help you handle some of these formats. So, for example, in Premiere Pro, there are certain formats where it will basically apply an input lot based on the folder structure and file name of that file, right? And so people like, well, I'm looking at the effects panel in Premiere. There's nothing on this clip in the timeline. That's because it applied that transform to the master clip in the project panel that you have

to load the master clip and sure enough, oh yeah, there's a transform. Premiere Pro also is kind of an ongoing development of their color management. And we've seen things where recently, especially with like Sony footage, for example, like a lot of people use Sony cameras for reality TV, where all of a sudden, like, we're getting these files that, like, that looks like way over saturated, what's going on there. And, you know, Premiere Pro is doing some sort of media management. We're saying, oh, I see this S-log.

I'm going to make that wreck 2020 just because I'm trying to help you out, right? Yeah, you do you guys a favor. And that's that that is where one thing that we've done and we evolve it over the years because as these software changes, the menu settings change, we have a library of screen grabs of where all these settings are. Because you know, when you're doing Final Caller, you're going to meet with editors of an incredible wide range of technical skill levels. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, there are some editors who could care less. about color space, depth, file formats, whatever, and they are the best creative editors in the world. And they focus on the timing and the cuts

and making that edit perfect. Right. Right. They might not know that Premiere is going to go and throw a color space transform on it. And when we ask them for a file, they'll be like, this is how it was. You know, they might not be used to going into those menus.

And we want to make that process as easy and seamless to them as possible. And sometimes it can be really counterintuitive. Like, you said, Premiere will sometimes go and put a color space effect on the source side. How do you get rid of that? You take your S-log footage and you tell Premiere that it's Rex 709. Yeah.

Now, the most observant is also will say that that S-log footage is not Rex 709. What are you doing? But since you're setting the timeline to Rex 709, when you set the source to Rex 709, what you're essentially telling Premiere to do is do nothing. Right, yeah, right? Take this input, put it to the output, which is exactly what we want. I would love to do that. I would like to love to have all these software have just a master bypass switch. You're exporting the color? Bypass it. After Effects used to have it, or it still has an after-fax because they preserve

RGB checkbox. There is a global mute in Premiere, but yeah, I hear you. It doesn't turn off everything. It doesn't affect color space transforms, I don't believe. Now, in Avid, the process is a little bit different because in Premiere, when you set that on the clip side, it's going to ripple to your timeline automatically. In Avid, that color transform is applied when you edit from a source clip to the timeline. to the timeline. It puts what's called a color adapter in the timeline. So if you go back to the

source side in Avid, remove the color effects. Your timeline will not change until you right click on that timeline and say, update timeline, update all color adapters. So if you're in this situation, we're like, okay, yeah, I got to get rid of all these offline color transforms. I got rid of them all in the bin, but my timeline's not updating. In Avid is just because you need to refresh the timeline and it'll go in and get the right metadata. So there is one special thing about conforms, I'm sorry, about baked workflows that some people make them, you know, kind of lean towards a conform, but there is a way of doing bakes with complicated projects. It's like, one of the, situation we often see is people go, well, listen, I got 17 layer composite in this show,

and how do I deal with that, right? Or I have a bazillion cameras. It would be great to separate out those cameras, you know, so you can use them and quickly identify them over in color. So there's a couple of ways that we can handle that. Number one, you are not limited to just exporting a single bake of a timeline, right? So it could be that you have a bake for each layer in a timeline, right? You're exporting individual bakes. It doesn't even have to be the whole timeline. It could be a section of the timeline where you're doing in and out and go,

hey, I'm going to export each one of these layers, you know, with an alpha channel or something, and then you kind of combine them together. So we've done that before also just by the by the by with projects that for various reasons we chose not to conform But they separated cameras out onto different tracks so everything on track one was this camera Everything on track two was that camera. That's a way to do it But when composites are involved That leads us to kind of the third part of this right and that is sort of the hybrid workflow right at the combining the conform and combining the big

So I'll give you a perfect situation. There is a, there's a, we'll use the composite again. There is a situation where 99% of the show is cut to cut, not raw material, nobody needs handles. So it's a candidate for, in our opinion, it's a candidate for a baked workflow, right? But then there's a section where there's a lot of floating boxes on screen. There's some weird transitions going on or whatever, right? We don't have to have that as part of the bake. oftentimes when we look at those situations, and this is part of the project evaluation at the very, you know, start when we talk to a client, is we'll say, hey, look, just mute those layers or mute that section, make your bake, then go back in and let's do a consolidator or a media manage on just that section, right?

And then we'll conform just that section back into the resolved timeline. So we have the original bake that we've cut up and everything's going swimmingly with that. And now we'll take this complex section. will do a true conform on it. And the same is true with things like raw. You know, people will ask a question, well, I have raw material in my bake timeline. How do I handle that?

Generally speaking, we give clients recipes of how to develop their raw material if they're making a bake. But if we get to a situation in a bake and we're looking at it, and so classic case of this is like something like a window that's blown out or overexposed and we're going, man, I can't restore that detail

from this bake. we can say to them, hey, we just need to do a conform on, you know, this one clip or this section of clips that's raw and conform back to the raw. So you can combine those things as needed. Yeah, and like you said, this is all part of the project evaluation stage, right? You want to take a detailed look with your client of what the sources are and where you're going and come up with a plan before you start headlong into any workflow. Best example for the hybrid workflow that I've had is a lot of documentaries, right? Because we do a lot of docs that have tons and tons of just archive video footage and crap pulled from the internet or various other

sources that you're never going to want to do a conform on. It's got crazy time code, sizing's all messed up, half of its MP4 files, you know, absolute nightmare, low quality stuff that we can only do so much for, right? It's a documentary, it's archival, that's to be expected. Conforming that stuff is just throwing time into the toilet and flushing it to never be seen again. Yeah, I mean, client probably doesn't have budget for that either. Right.

But the client has also all of these beautifully shot either recreations or interviews that they shot on digital cinema cameras. It's all new footage. It's all raw. Well, guess what? Sort those in there in L.E.

Put them on another track. We'll do an XML and a conform of just the camera raw files. Camera raw files are easy to conform because they always have good time code and they always have good metadata because they came right out of the camera with it. Right?

We'll bake the base layer of all of the archival stuff, the MP4s, everything else, and then we'll put the XML layer of the conformed camera raws on top. So we get the best of both worlds. We save time where we can save time with no loss of quality. And we take less time

where we can get high quality be going to the raw because those conforms of just the camera stuff is an easier conform than it conform of the whole film with all of those mismash of archive sources. Totally. And so, I mean, this really just nails home the point about why it's so important as a colorist and as a finisher

to evaluate and watch a project, a sample of a project, before you say yes and decide on which way you're going to go, right? I think, you know, in the various places, forums, and various communities, I've kind of got like this rep as like, oh, yeah, Rob's just talking about baking out again, right? And yeah, it might be true, but I got to be honest with you, like the reason I'm kind of like that is because 99% of the time, I just see people making, as you just said, making their lives 10 times more difficult for zero return on things, right? And no client wants to throw money away.

Right, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, those three, those are the three main workflows. Which one you're going to use is going to largely be dependent on the project. The beautiful thing is that it's not one or the other or whatever. you can use all three of these kind of workflows depending on the project and depending on the need. I would just say the most important thing is for you as a finisher and the colorist

to understand how the project is being put together to make the best recommendations possible given the timing and schedule of the project, given the budget of the project, but also the general knowledge base of the client, the editor, etc. You know, I've seen so many editors over the years, just gloss over and just go, wait what? Right? You know, those types of editors, we want to make it easy on them. Our job is not to like make our client's life's difficult, right? So if we have an editor that goes, dude, I don't, I've never done that before. I have no idea what you're

talking about. Try to make it as simple as possible for them to get the best results possible, right? And in reality, I think what most clients want these days is get me to grading as fast as I possibly can, right? And often what that means becoming more and more increasingly often, we are suggesting the clients that they hire dedicated online editors in-house. Why we suggest that also is because they have better budgetary control over that person rather than charging a high hourly rate that will charge them. Two, they're in-house, so there's not data being uploaded, downloaded, moved over on drive, so only figure out later that there's a problem. And then three, often that person being in-house has access to things that we as finishers wouldn't have access to, right?

Like, oh, you know what, this clip is screwed up. Let's go back to the source drive or the source transfer and pull it from there, right? There's overriding reasons for that to happen. The important thing, Joey, here, is that there's no right or wrong with any of these workflows. It's just deciding what the best thing is and best match for your client. Yeah, and that's the thing. like the way I like to frame this with clients and even with other colorists is we're here to kind of guide the client through this process in the way that's the most economical and painless to them. So just be careful about some of the really overly technical stuff and the back and forth, especially when you're dealing with their editors.

Like I said, there's a wide range of technical ability in editors. You don't want to be sending out email saying, hey, you sent me this wrong thing. I thought I told you this and throw their editor under the bus when he doesn't know what the premiere is doing to the color management, right? He wasn't worried about that. So it's just one of those things where it just goes back to client communication is let's try to shepherd the client through this process

in the way that is the most comfortable to them and gets them to the best product and the best experience possible. Absolutely. I forgot one more. We'll put this as a postscript to this episode that I forgot to mention. And that's just handling graphics and overlays, because that's an important part of the equation, obviously, if you're doing final packaging and final delivery.

In either case, in a conform workflow, those graphics may come, may not come with the consolidate. If they were generated in the NLE, chances are they will not come with that consolidate because they were generated by a title generator in, you know, Premier or Avid or whatever. if they were rendered out from a motion graphics program like After Effects and their individual clips, well guess what? They're just like any other clip. They can be conformed just like any other clip to the timeline. And a baked workflow when handling graphics, what we often ask for is a bake of the entire show that's all effects removed and textless. And then we'll handle the graphics, whether we're conforming them or they're making us another bake with an alpha channel just to lay on top. We'll handle that as a separate file. The graphics is the same conversation as the show.

Do you want to do a bake? Do you want to do a consolidate and a conform? You know, and all of the same caveats. And pros and cons apply there as well. Well, hopefully you better understand now what we mean by conform, baked or flat file, and hybrid workflows. Again, the choice is not a right or wrong issue. It's about aligning and creating the best match for your client and for your project.

So hope this helps. For the Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carman. I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for watching. Thank you.