The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP052: Conform.Tools

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

In this episode of The Offset Podcast, we're joined by Brandon Thomas & Stefan Allen from Conform.Tools. Conforming is one of those processes in modern postproduction and finishing that can be technically challenging and a huge time suck. Different NLEs and color/finishing tools all think slightly differently. For example; positioning or a speed change in Premiere Pro might not show up correctly when conformed into DaVinci Resolve.  Over the years editors, colorists, and conform artists have built hacks and built up institutional knowledge of workflows for moving projects from one system to another but even at their best, the methods can be tedious and are seldom set it and forget it.  Conform.Tools is a suite of tools that is poised to really change how conforms are done making them efficient, fast and dare we say fun!  We were super excited to sit down with the guys and talk about the challenges of conforming and how conform.tools can help on your text project. Some of the specifics we discuss in this episode include:What makes conforming so challengingThe problem of different math and algorithms between different applicationsDealing with common conform problems like in/out point slippage, reel names, and other timecode issuesWorking with sizing and speed differences including speed ramps, interpreted clips, and speed interpolationGoals of conform.tools and looking at the workflowConform.Tools module: Timeline ExchangeConform.Tools module: i20Conform.Tools module Conform Connect including the forthcoming desktop appThe team at NAB & The NAB 2026 Colorist MixerAnd more!Check out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.  Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you in about two weeks for a new episode.

Hey there, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. Today we're talking about the wacky and wonderful world of conforming and about a product always to make all of that much easier. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific's XMP 551 and XMP 651, the flagship QD OLED reference monitors that are reshaping modern grading rooms. Their large format and industry-leading viewing angles let clients see accurate images, from anywhere in the room, and their true HDR and SDR reference performance makes single monitor room layouts possible.

When everyone relies on the same display, you avoid the headache of explaining why the client grading monitors don't match. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I am one of your host, Robbie Carmen. With me, as always, is Joey Dana. Hey, Joey, how are you, buddy? Hey, everyone. Well, Joey, today we decided that we wanted to dig a little deeper on a topic or a conversation that we have talked about before.

We've talked about conforms and bakes and the best workflows there. But we recently sort of had this subject come back up to mind sort of in the forefront because we welcome to a brand new sponsor to the show, the guys at conform. And so in checking out their product, we're like, oh, what does this tool do? and it just got us to realize, man, conform is such a deep and sort of technical, sort of artistic process at the same time that is full of a lot of like, you know, sort of learned institutional knowledge, a lot of mistakes that people make, assuming that something works one way or the other way. And like if you're not, I always think like if you're not really that technical of a person,

like the conform process might as well be like reading like, you know, a Charles Pointin book or something like that for the for the uninitiated you know it's like it's a real technical process that can be a little overwhelming don't you agree yeah and for me i i love this stuff because you know as most people know at this point i kind of grew up in the online editing world of first tape to tape and then nonlinear online editing so conform has been part of my bread and butter for over 20 years right it's always been bringing in all the high res stuff from what was used to be an offline at it or maybe a proxy edit now or just these days, they might even be editing full res,

but getting everything from a Premiere or a final cut into a resolve or even going resolve to resolve for conform. There's so many infinite different workflow possibilities that come with every single project. And every single project has its own unique challenges depending on what the needs are, how it was edited, how it's being finished. So this is a subject, like you said,

there's a lot of technical and instillings institutional knowledge that goes into it. It's like, oh, I remember that Premiere handles this one time code issue in this one way because of a project I did 10 years ago. You know, so I've been in the online editing and conform world for for all of my career. So I love this subject. It's something I feel like we've we've dealt with a lot and we've solved a lot of problems, but there's always, like I said, every project has its own challenges and is different. So conform is always like a little bit of a, of a, of a, of a, brain engineering challenge. And if you look at it that way, it's, it can be fun. Well, you know, the other way to look at it, for me, too, is that to me, it's very much a translation issue. It's like, it's like a language thing, right? You're speaking one language over here with one tool set and part of the process and you're translating that over to another tool set and another part of the process. And in translation, as the phrase goes, right, things can be lost and translated, you know, translation, confused in translation. So yeah, and I come from, you know, obviously a similar background

were the online days of, you know, okay, fine, like we're going to go from whatever, AVR 3 to 70s, you know, whatever the formats were back then, right? So it has a lot of similar things. But before we get just a last little bit of housekeeping before we jump back in, as a reminder, you can always follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for the Offset Podcasts. You can, of course, watch the video version of this show over on YouTube. And then the show is also available on all major podcasting platforms,

including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. All right. So, Joey, I think we could bandy about this subject for a long time, but nobody wants to hear us blab all the time. So we are very lucky today to have two experts to join us. These are actually some good friends who have just started a brand new company and just came on board as a sponsor. And those are the guys from conform tools.

We have Brandon Thomas and we have Stefan Allen. Guys, welcome. How are you? Doing great. Thanks for having us. Hey, Robbie. Thanks for having us. Brandon, I've known for, gosh, probably going almost on 20 years now.

He is the principal, one of the principals down at TBD Post down in Austin, Texas, a major post house in the area. And they do a wide range of work from, you know, narrative features and docs to advertising to, you know, you name it, they do it. And Stefan is one of the team members down there as well. And guys, I want to tell this story for you. So let's back up to the beginning. So obviously conform was something that's been on your minds, obviously from your day-to-day jobs of what you do. Just tell us a little bit about kind of, you know, what conform means to you, what you saw some of the challenges and kind of how the idea for sort of getting started with a product, and we'll dive into the product, obviously, but how the sort of the origins of this started as sort of an idea. I mean, I think a big part of it is, you know, when, you know, my background's also like a colorist, you know, and so, like,

Like a lot of times we want the color session to look as similar to what was an offline and what the final product is going to be as possible. So I don't think everybody works this way, but we go through like large pains to make that experience for the client in the room as like close to perfection as possible. And so as things evolve, like it's been really fascinating to kind of watch like interlacing used to be this thing that you would like spend days on fixing and tearnexing and all that stuff. And now people are like, we like that. It makes it feel like nostalgic. You know, like, you got to be careful because you get Joey going on interlays. We did a whole episode on that. Yeah, but it like it kills me.

But it's like, you know, but it's just like that's kind of how things are evolving. And but it's just like we still want to try and bring things to this like as close to perfect as possible. And how to do that as efficiently as possible because like there are, you know, I think a lot of what this tool came out of was like a documentary project where they'd spent three years doing these really detailed moves on stills and all this stuff that like was really intentional like detailed work that. did not in any way come over from premier and so it's like literally stephan and um you know spending days like rebuilding all this stuff so that it looks like what had been delivered to us but i think you know more than anything it's just like the the attention to detail it has to be there and like you know i think when you're working on the team it's like we're always like looking you know checking each other's work just have each other's backs and like you know if something got missed here

we're fixing it here and just so i think it's just always been this process of how do we streamline this thing to get as close to perfect as quick in the process as possible to get ahead of those problems later because we're always smashed to the finish line. You know, we do a lot of films that go to festivals and like, you know, the people are always like just trying to spend every second like just perfecting the story. And so as much as we can bring ourselves away from finding problems in the last second is just always something that makes life better. But yeah, it's just it's a intensely detailed focus thing that just will consume, you know,

days of time and just. And it's, and it's been my experience, too, that like one of the, and I'm curious on your thoughts about this, Stefan, because like you, correct me if I'm wrong, you have a sort of online editing flame kind of background as your kind of kind of story. And I think that that's interesting because I think a lot of, a lot of people who this product is interested, you know, is focused to that we'll talk about is, you know, the editor or the colorist sort of, you know, either prepping or preparing. And I think that a lot of, it's easy in that conversation to realize. that there are people who specialize at this type of work. And I'm curious, like, you know, having done this for years, why is it a specialty? What is it like, do you find conforming, like, using a different part of your brain? Are there technical skills that, you know, you've just, you've amassed over the years that it's just too difficult to explain to somebody else? Like, what draws you to that process and why, like, why did you think that, like, hey, we could improve on this? Yeah.

I mean, conform is like there's no handbook. that tells you like this is exactly how this is supposed to go. And every program works differently and the translations are different. And it's really like you said, it's just like a lot of institutional knowledge that you kind of collect over time. And it's very much like this part has to happen before this part has to happen before this part. And if you mess that up, it can really sort of snowball in a way that adds a bunch of time, especially when it comes to like dealing with large media sources and stuff like that. So, you know, and then I think like I realize at some point it's like it's all math at a certain level.

And it's like, doesn't this work if it's, you know, it's like one plus one equals two. So it's like it should it should in some way work. So there must be something in the format that is. making these two programs not talk to each other. But yeah, I mean, to answer your question, it's it, it is creative and it is, you know, like I find a lot of joy in doing it sometimes, but when it comes to like keyframes that were like purposefully tweaked in offline, which is happening more and more, I feel like people are like really like sweetening this stuff in offline and then they bring it to online. Like Brandon said, it's like we get into a color

session or something and then all of a sudden they're like wait a second why isn't that like speed ramp exactly how i had it and now they're asking questions about that as opposed to like the color it's it's it's it's like yeah it's the color equivalent of what monitor i look at like now that things are like just slightly different right yeah i'm in the room like no this i promise it's not going to be like this is just what it's going to be like in color and then when it gets to the finish it's going to be fixed and it's just like you know that's just taking away from the work we're trying to do yeah let me mention two quick things. Brandon, you mentioned that as you're going through this process in kind of the conventional way without any additional tools to help you.

Let's just call it the fully manual way, right? One of the biggest problems, one of the biggest challenges is finding, identifying and fixing, not mistakes, but let's say inconsistencies or errors. Because, you know, if you've got an hour long show with 2,000 shots in it and one person is going through every single shot, checking it against reference, maybe using a difference blending mode, and you get into this mindset where, okay, well, the difference blending mode can have, you know, X amount of offness to it because we're going from lowness, for example. So there's a touch hold, and that's a judgment call.

And you're going through and you kind of calibrate your brain to check these sequences and you get into autopilot and we're humans, right? We're not robots. Every time you go through this conform process, even the best of us that have been doing this for 20 years and have tuned our brain to try to find single pixel errors almost like one pixel in one frame something always falls through that's why you need to do multiple passes that's why it's important to have multiple people on the team look at these things and flag things I feel like that's one of the situations where automation

and customized tools are really stronger than any artist can be because the likelihood of them oh shot next shot next shot next shot next shot i missed something right yeah i mean that goes down down the drain yeah i mean i think we have an incredible team but we're we're thrown a million different directions all the time you know it's like we're really fortunate that like you know we're working on a movie or two in a commercial campaign and then there's a documentary coming through and they need a DCP and so like our team is just like constantly kind of jumping to this project and that project and you know like everyone's doing an awesome job but you know it's first frame last frame check a difference mode and all that stuff. And it's just like, and then, okay, cool, there's revisions

and there's stuff coming through. And so it's just like, there's all that stuff flying around all the time. And it's like, yeah, we're human. We're going to miss something. And that's kind of like, I think that team dynamic of like everyone's got each other's back of just like, we're all kind of in this together to kind of catch stuff where we can along the way. And that's important to build into the workflow, the assumption that you can keep your, anybody can keep their eye out for a mistake and flag it because these workflows are so complicated that it's possible for errors to get introduced at any step in the process. Well, I think the I think the other interesting part, especially coming from a facility background,

we've mentioned the idea of institutional knowledge a couple times, right, is that, you know, just the ebb and flow of people in and out of a facility, right? So, like, you know, you somebody gets good at this, you know, they're with you guys for a year or two, and then they, you know, whatever, they move on to other things, they leave the company or whatever. And now it's like, oh, how did they do that? Like, what were the five steps that they did? And I think that Joey's right onto a certain thing that, like, you know, automation and sort of algorithmically, sort of programming this part of things to a certain degree, right?

Like, lessens that potential loss of institutional knowledge when the next thing happens. But also, it strikes me that, and we'll talk about this just in the next thing I want to talk about is all the various pieces that could go wrong. It strikes me that if this is sort of programmed and done algorithmically, that you can, you have a base that you can continue to add to as new features develop, new workflows develop new, oh, well, you know, Premier change this or resolve change that, right? And you can make those tweaks and get that kind of programmed in for everybody rather than going, hey, I figured this out.

Don't tell anybody this is the secret sauce kind of thing to get. So I think that's a big thing. Now, let's talk a little bit about some of the core challenges here. Again, I want to sort of give you my version of what conform is and see if, see if I'm right, because you guys are spending a lot of time in this, right? Okay, so here's the situation. somebody's edited a film, let's just call it a narrative feature, okay? They've edited a film, and let's say they've used Premiere Pro, right?

And they've brought in, let's say they've, you know, two really, really a lot of shooting. So they've done proxy workflow for everything. They got this timeline that's all proxied. And then they did things like speed changes, some temp color correction, et cetera. And now they got to go, okay, well, I got to flip those proxies, flatten my multi-cams, look at my speed changes, adjust my sizing. I was thinking about this last name. There's like 10 things.

Let me see if you get these drive of what you have. So time code and file naming, big one, right? Reels, things of that nature. Things like the offline online workflow can screw up if you don't realize that you're in it. Things like sizing and speed change is probably the biggest pain in the asses especially from Premier Pro,

and I want to ask you guys why that is in just a moment. Things like VFX concerns. Like where am I going to pull these shots? How am I going to automate that process? Things like trim and transfer. for, okay? So we've got this all correct. Now, how do we package it up and move it over to the other place? What do they need on their end, right? There's probably about 10 other more things that I can add to that. But it's like broad categories. Is that kind of fit? Or where else do you

guys see some of the major pain points? Stefan, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think like in and out points of the clips, that's like the first thing. If you don't have a clip that can link or it's linking to the wrong time code or something, that's a huge problem. And then on top of that is sizing and then the things that are more complicated like speed ramps and easing of keyframes and things like that traditionally hasn't been something that carries across in a conform. So that's like where we're doing a lot of work to kind of make it look correct. But yeah, I think what you said is more or less like the layers upon layers of what you deal with in a conform.

So let's start with sizing and positioning because I think that's going to be on the forefront. of everybody's mind because the most common workflow that we run into, and I think this is the same for most of the people that listen to the show. Obviously, there's a million different workflows, but the one we see the most, and we have the most problems with, is going from Premiere to resolve, having sizing issues. And there's a couple components to that, right? There is the, how do you deal with sizing in Premiere? As in if in Premier you're editing a in a 1080 timeline and you have 4K sources, then we go into resolve for a 4K fit. with those 4K sources from their 1080 timeline.

How does the scaling map? Now, in resolve, we have this luxury of basically all access information is stored internally, kind of relatively. So if we go from a 720 canvas to an 8K canvas, all of our sizing stays the same, all of our windows stays the same, all of our geometry stays the same. Not the case with Premiere. So explain to us a little bit on the. the broadest possible scale.

We don't need to get into like the super details. Why is the way Premier handles axes and sizing so, I hesitate to say idiotic and wrong, but why is it so idiotic and wrong? And then how do we map that to a world of reality? Can I add two more? Before you answer, let me add two or three more sprinkles on top of that, right?

I think Joey sort of went quickly over the way that you handle it in Premier Pro because I think that's a big deal, right? There's the set and scale to frame size options. There's the manual adjust X and Y and changing. And it's always seen. And I don't know if this is correct. I've been spouting this for a year. So if it's BS, I apologize to anybody I told it to. But it seems to me that the Premier Pro coordinate system is, how should I say this? It's built on like, I don't know. There's something about it's built on like source media, not like canvas, like the canvas size, like the timeline size. I think your backroads, right? It's built on the canvas size, not the source size. I don't know. I don't know. These guys will tell us.

Anyway, let's start there, guys. Why is this such a cluster? And what can be done to fix it? Well, I think it's a cluster because they don't intend you to leave the system. You know, I think that's the truth about a lot of these companies is that they want you to stay in their ecosystem as long as possible. They want you to do everything there. They want you to do everything in Premiere.

They want you to do everything in Reservoir. all that we do everything in avid, you know. And I think that's where this comes from. And then I think the supporting these export formats like, you know, XML or, you know, OTIO, it's like they're kind of, like, they're often very like half-hearted attempts because they're like, you know, please the community kind of thing. Yeah. It's like, hey, we're going to support this, but we're not really going to fully commit to it in a way that's actually going to make it solve the problem. Well, like the open timeline I.O. one is a perfect example. For those of you don't know what that is, it's a, I should say, hopeful standard of the idea that we can unify a lot of these kind of settings into one universal

timeline format that a lot of people have said, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, even Resolve supports it now, right? But as you said, Brandon, like, do they really support it? Or is it just something they put a menu item in? You know, and it's kind of like, I'm not saying that they haven't done the work. I'm just saying your sentiment about kind of the half-hearted approach definitely rings true. I mean, I think there's like, this is what it is. And so. So, you know, I think they're, you know, they're checking the boxes of it does this thing to go into an OTIO, but it doesn't necessarily, like, everyone's doing it differently, though. So, like, the results you get coming from Premier or Abbott or, you know, they're all going to kind of give you a different thing. And I think for certain workflows, like, especially like VFX polls, like that might be exactly what you need because you're really getting the time, like the clip information or like your in and outs and your real names and all that stuff.

And I think any platform is going to support that. but then when it starts getting into like the speed and the sizing and all that stuff, it really starts to kind of fall short for now. And hopefully that will continue to improve. Support for this episode comes from conform tools. Conform Tools allows you to translate timelines between Premier and Resolve and other NLEs while automatically solving common issues that normally need to be fixed by hand. Avoid time-consuming trim and transfer issues and securely send large media files to collaborators

at a fraction of the size and in minutes instead of hours. With a growing toolbox of features, let conform tools handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative. Built by Post professionals, Conform Tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform.tools. I don't know if it's so much that it's like half-hearted as it is that like they are following the spec according to what OTIO wrote or XML Apple back in the day. back in the day. It's just that like both specs can be correct, but they don't talk to each other because they have coordinate systems and all that, which is to your question earlier about why

everything is such a cluster in Premiere, which is true. Yeah, I think like in Premiere, everything is based on, it's not resolution agnostic is the way I like to phrase it. And also, resolve isn't either. if you have certain settings set. So it's like if you have your input scaling set to scale the fit, entire image to fit, then you're in this like frame agnostic form.

So you can go from HD to UHD and back. Premiere doesn't really have that option. It's just like sort of locked to whatever resolution you made your timeline in. So that's where a lot of that pain comes from. Because a lot of times it's like you're cutting in HD because that's easy and that's what you do. and offline and then all of a sudden you have to deliver in U-HD and resolve. And if you just pull that XML in, you know, it's like all the sizing is based off of

HD and it might look fine in HD, but then you go to UHD and all the sizing is screwed up. And then. Yeah, and there's lots of hacks to that. Like we found, what's the one we found like the center crop or whatever? Like there's like there's different modes that you could put resolve in to kind of sort to get it to work. But then there's always those those couple outliers, right, that just don't know matter what, you know, because they were a weird aspect ratio or whatever, they don't do their thing,

you know? Yeah, there's a lot of hacks of like input sizing, you know, output. Like there's different ways to kind of trick it. Like, you know, when adjustment layers got added to resolve, there was a period where we're like, we were trying to mess with adjustment layer sizing for a hot minute. It didn't, it didn't stick. Don't worry. But it was just like one of those, like, what can we do to solve this?

And like, you know, anamorphic footage was a whole other, you know, can or worms. All right. So, so sizing is obviously a big issue. One of the ones that your tool set, we're going to talk about a little bit. will attack. The next one is speed changes. I think that's another one that can drive people a little bonkers. I will admit to something that a lot of the content that we do doesn't have very complicated speed changes, right? It's like, it's like a fit to fill or it's like a standard frame rate kind of conversion of, you know, 25 to 2398 or whatever, like relatively static,

each straightforward stuff. I think that stuff has relatively worked for a while most of the time. Yeah. But what about like I find people like, you know, who have eagle eyes about variable speed changes and ramps and they're like, oh, see how that like, that's a little different here and a little different there. Like, why is that infinitely more complicated in it from a translation point of view? And like what's the right way? Like is it just, again, case of different math in different places or is there a one side just sort of doing it the right way, one side doing it the, you know, the improper way or whatever? It's not that they're doing it like the improper way. Well, there's a few things that, like, I think Adobe never bothered to fix about their export XML thing.

There's, like, these bugs that I've found when trying to build these tools that even if you bring it back into Premiere, it doesn't look like. And part of that, you know, Craig, I'm wrong here. But when you export an XML from Premiere, you're exporting a Final Cut 7 format XML, right? Even the format it's going to is very legacy. Yeah, and that's like it's a pretty powerful format. I don't personally understand why they like made so many other ones, but it can store a lot of information. That's not really the problem. It's just like for example, like the first thing that was driving me nuts was we would get these projects from Premiere and I'd get them to be matching and I'm like, okay, so these clips are matching and resolve. That means like my translation is corrected. Then all of a sudden we'd get to a clip and it would be. like tiny square and so i'm like what the heck is happening here and it was because they set the scale the frame size thing so then i'm like googling and finding forums and and you know people are like oh yeah this is a thing that's always been a thing and it's like yeah and then that goes to the institutional

knowledge thing but that the scale the frame size doesn't get recorded in an xml anywhere so it's like if you set that in premiere that information or with your you know with a of speed changes, one of the big, big, big issues that we've always had is when editors in Premiere take different frame rates and tell Premiere to interpret it as a different frame rate. I have a 60p clip. I want to tell it to over crank at 2398. And there's no way for the XML to have that information. So Resolve is expecting a completely different time code system. And obviously that's not going to work. Yeah, yeah. That is you kind of have to know what clips have been reinterpreted before you even import the XML.

And then you have the best chance of getting them to link in because you can pull the media in, reinterpret it, then pull the XML in, and then hopefully it will link up. But that's like, how are you supposed to know that? And I feel like, you know, that's kind of a overall conceptual thing on starting on the edit side is should you even do that or should you know that this is a 60 frame a second clip? So I need to, if I want it to be overcranked, you know, like you said, it all comes back down to math so that you could do that overcrank with a speed effect in the timeline without changing the source side if you do the ratio of, I don't know the math. I think it's one fifth or, yeah, is it one fifth or whatever the number, whatever the ratio. If you do that speed effect and set it to a linear interpolation, you will get a frame for frame over crank from those source clips without having to go through this whole process.

But I don't think a lot of people, one, know that or two, want to go through that whole process. Yeah, we're kind of of the mindset. I think that like the people on the edits, we don't have control over that. And people are just like, Premier lets you do whatever you want. It's like, and people are going to do whatever they want. So we're less about, you know, like, hey, if you reinterpret it, like make sure, you know, you do the speed change instead. It's like, okay, well, for me, it's like, if it's showing up correctly in Premiere, it should have to figure out why and then get it to do the same thing. And that makes a lot of sense because it helps, you know, it lets the creative people, you know, focus on the creative edit and then let the technical people and the technical software handle the technical side.

It does obviously help if someone is like tidy in their. but like you know can't be can't be asking too much so the other speed related thing that i think we see often is the idea that somebody has frame rate slight not not the extreme example that joey gave like the 60 to 23 but the hey i have stock footage that's 2997 and i dropped it in 23998 timeline or 25 or whatever right and premier pro does it's you know it's default frame interpulation right uh to get that to get that math to work is dealing with, because I think a lot of editors these days are hip to, or at least sensitive enough these days to like things like repeated frames and that problem, right? Because a lot of them are delivering

to digital platforms that those repeated flames get, you know, flagged in QC and whatnot. Is that part of translation with speed also a challenging problematic thing to solve, right? Like, you know, because I feel like a lot of editors are like, oh, well, I'll make this look better by just changing it over to optical flow and not realizing that optical flow is, you know, inventing frames and, you know, that kind of stuff. Are those different interpolation modes, in other words, a problem in this process as well? I think we've pretty much solved those. Yeah, I mean, they are a problem. They're also like a creative problem. I think when you have like a 25 clip in a 2398 timeline, and then all of a sudden that edit has been locked, but now the 25 is doing a weird cadence and you're

like, you know, if I just bed this to whatever 96% or whatever that is, we wouldn't have that weirdness and like is that okay do I have to get that approved or like how do I sort of fix those issues but as far as like the translation goes that is less of uh I mean like with our tools of course but and I think with the XML as well that's less of a headache than like the speed ramp which got you really a pain so one more we talked about speed changes we talked about sizing we talked about some of this time code stuff I want to talk about the worst case scenario because like okay I don't know if this is a pipe dream. But one of the things that comes, you know, in any conform, even if you get it relatively automated or whatever, is there's still going to be those judgment calls. There's still

going to be the situation where you're, you know, taking, you know, an offline reference and doing a difference mode and trying to line things up. One of the things that's always, and I don't know if this is like me just being wishful thinking about it, but it's always just seem like relatively low-hanging fruit. And again, that's Simpleton's way of explaining it, is Why can't I just look at an offline version of a reference file and go, hey, computer, I paid $10,000 for you. You're smart. Why can't you look at this?

Here's a folder of media and just figure out how to put it together. Am I wrong? Does that seem like something that we should be striving to and that we should be able to get to at one point in time? I think we're, you know, the answer is like we want that to. You know, like, so we're actually like testing something that it's trying to work towards that. And there's there are things out there that do that, but they're not accessible to small facilities and individuals. You know, it's a lot of computing power to like go through and analyze that stuff.

So we're, you know, I think as these GPUs get better and all that stuff, it's like we're experimenting with some stuff like that that I think can help with that. It's, I was doing a car commercial recently and it was all rips from these previous like existing spots. And, you know, there was no. no original file names or anything like that. And like, you know, it was about two and a half, three hours to rebuild a 30 second spot, you know, by just everything by hand, you know, and even though like we had the XMLs and everything is just like,

there's no real metadata to work with. So I think, you know, in that situation, I don't think that would be too a crazy amount of compute. You know, it's just you've got to build that system out in a way that can do that. But yeah, that's definitely something we're, you know, exploring on as well, just like, can we solve that? Yeah, it just because I mean, it just seems

It just seems like, you know, that's the ultimate fix is just, I don't know, I don't have time for this. You do it, computer kind of thing, you know. It's in this bin. Go find it, you know. Right, right, exactly. So now that we've kind of figured out, you know, what the main problems we need to solve are, up until now, the process for doing this has been kind of a little bit of guess and check, a little bit of try this set of options on the export, try this set of options on the import and see how close it gets me and then tweet. Or if it all goes to hell just big, if it goes, just take my attitude. Just if all goes to hell, just bake it down and call it a day.

Yeah, or bake these sections and go through all this manually. Robbie baked. Let's talk about Confine tools. What are you guys doing on the actual product side that helps us solve some of these problems? Yeah, what is the product? I mean, like, I think that's one of the things that like, so we've identified the problems. What is the product and what is it hoping to solve? Maybe you can walk us through kind of like, you know, we've ended up on a lot of these problems.

Where do you guys step in and where do you think your approach is unique and different and worth the attention of people doing this work? Well, we have a few things that we've been working on. The first thing that we sort of touched on a bit is our tool for timeline exchange, which is built. The first problem, I guess we were trying to solve is how do we take a project from Premier into Resolve? make it work if we go up to UHD, make it so that we don't have to touch every clip and fix all the sizing and all that stuff. And from there, you know, we have the same issue going to Flame. We have the same issue going from Premier back to or Resolve back to Premier. So it's like all these translations aren't working the way that you would hope.

And so we've sort of solved that problem so that if you have something, set and resolve. You have a project in Premiere. You can export and bring it into Resolve and it is going to look like what it look like in Premiere. So that's sort of one of our products. Another one is we're trying to solve the media aspect of this as well, which we haven't really talked that much about. But like when you're conforming a project with original camera files, it's like we're talking about like terabytes of media. It's a ton of stuff. Like these are huge files these days. And And a lot of times, like, you don't need the whole captured set of media. You just need some files.

And it's just kind of like in a similar way, it's like every program has its own way of doing this. Every shop has its own way of doing this. There's a lot of institutional knowledge around how you should deal with that. But nevertheless, people still ship drives and or bake it. And it's like, that works. here at TBD, we're very like, I guess, like sort of purist about that. We don't, the anti-bake. Yeah, I got it.

We're anti-bake, yeah. But, I mean, from, you know, from my seat as a colorist in the chair, like having that source media, it gives me so much information that's like so valuable. Absolutely. Like, real names, time codes, all that stuff. Like, when I have that, like, I all use like a lot of smart filters and stuff like that. And it's like, I can grade, you know, my first pass so quickly because I can just do these really intelligence grouping and sorting and like, you know, run with that stuff.

And I have to be honest with you guys, I've come around a little bit on this. I think my, my, my tendency to go to the bake has often been one of hassle and budget, right? That like, totally. You're, you're not going to pay me for the three, three days to sift through your pile of crap. So why don't we just do it the easy way, right? But the more that I've gotten sophisticated or not even the more sophisticated, just sort of force myself to use some of the more, you know, advanced, you know, smart filtering, sorting, you know, whatever, like, you do realize, oh, this is the stuff that makes me faster.

And like, there's hacks and ways around it with, you know, with bakes and EDS and stuff like that. But they're, they're hacky, right? So I will, I will give you that, that it's the, if time and budget allows and now with your guys tool setting in, hopefully it will streamline some of that time that it is it is an advantageous thing to get a truly conformed project i mean i think really what we're after is like reducing friction you know so like if you can take our project from premier to resolve and the conform is like perfect or nearly perfect you might have just saved on a feature film a couple days you know that's real that's real money that's real money and it's in it's real time and then you know and the color of seed it's like then i have all the visibility i want and then i think it's that same thing

for the the transfer tool i2 oh it's like you know especially for short form stuff. You're sending commercials. It's like you can send just that little chunk. Like, I can't tell you, like, we have our production coordinator on a mission to return hard drives for like weeks now of just like, you know, our miles. We like, I think we're down to like 40 drives in house now. And we had like 200. You know, it's just like we it's just been this process of like it's just way more efficient to kind of handle these things. And it's kind of the antithesis of, you know, like don't send everything. Just like spend the smallest amount possible. So Stefan, you've outlined sort of I think the first two modules of what conform tools are, right?

So the timeline exchange kind of fixing all the crap, right? The speed changes, the sizing, et cetera. You've done that with timeline exchange. Now it's time to come to transfer it. So we have I2O, the transfer module, right? That allows us to sort of intelligently kind of bundle that up, medium manage it, trim it for transfer. Does now, does I2O also facilitate the actual transfer?

Or is it just the, hey, I'm gonna make a folder of stuff. Now it's up to you to move it? Yeah, it does. And I will mention that these are all things that were like these are all new tools and We're building them out and We're really excited about it, but they're they're changing in real time and getting better and better But for our I-2-0 Yeah, it's like for all ways that you might need to get media to someone whether that's like uploading it or just like packaging it in a way

So you can put it on your own Google Drive or Dropbox or or whatever And also like if you want to do sort of a live session to get the media over, we have solutions for all of that. And the whole idea behind it is that you're only capturing, I guess, on the receiving end, the literal bites of media that you need. So it's like trimming without having to actually change the essence of the files. And I can talk a little bit more about how that actually works on the technical side. But that's the- Yeah, I'm actually really like I've never heard of something. that can trim without trimming?

Like, how does that work? I think one of the coolest things about it is, like, you know, you don't have to, like, consolidate media and Premiere that can't maintain your raw footage. You know, you don't have to transcode that stuff. And so there's already a time savings there. But, yeah, this is like basically, it appears as it's the original source file on the other side without, you know, having to ascend the entire piece of media. So without giving away any proprietary information, if I had to guess here, what you're saying

is that it's able to sort of intelligently go, this is the frame that I want to start on, this is the frame I want to end on, and close the file at either end, so it's a complete thing, right? But getting rid of superfluous information, is that kind of the general idea? It's not getting rid of it.

It's just saying, like, this is never going to be scrubbed in the timeline because you're importing all this footage there. So it's like, this can all just be, as far as the computer is aware, zero information. So the metadata about the size of the file, the length of the file, how many frames it's supposed to have, all that stuff stays the same.

But the actual information that you need is what gets transferred over. So that's actually a really interesting and I'd say innovative and new approach that nobody's really attempted before, right? Because even the, you know, Premiere can do obviously the transcode thing, which we don't really want to do. But Resolve can do pretty advanced trimming of raw files where it gives you a new file with a new in and out. But that doesn't really solve this problem for some workflows

because you have to have the original file here. And we're talking about getting the project from the editor to the colorist. So what you're saying is when you go through the process of the I-2O transfer, it's going to give, say, for example, resolve at the destination end, an R3D file that its metadata says it's an hour long, right? but everything is zeroed out except for the section that you're actually going to be using in the conforms. So you'd be able to in resolve scrub through an hour of black that is not taking any data up on the job. I see.

Okay. So let me see. That's that's that's that is new and innovative in a way that I don't think anybody else has ever attempted, let alone make work. And I think it's really freaking smart. If you're heading to NAB 2026 in Las Vegas, stop by. booth in 1827 and see FSI's latest reference monitors up close. The team will be there all week talking color, calibration, and monitoring workflows for production, post, and broadcast.

Let's just play arbitrary numbers. Let's just say that that file is, I don't know, 20 gigs on my source hard drive, my original location hard drive. And I'm using 10 seconds of it, so let's use another number. Let's say that gets it down to 2 gigs from 20, right? you're saying that I'm only transferring the two gigs, but from a metadata perspective, reconnect perspective,

it looks to the computer as just as the original 20 gig file, same in and out, same data, but everything that's not that content is just blankness, it's a void. That's exactly. Okay. That's genius.

That is pretty cool. Are there any issues, because I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, the timeline exchange part would clean, up things first, right, to then do, because like there's no danger of, oh, well, I did this trim, but now I've done a variable speed change on it. And now I'm trying to bring in frames from the, the voided part. Like, that doesn't really happen in practice because we're doing the timeline

exchange part first. Is that? Yeah, it's using the same tools that we've developed for timeline exchange to sort of parse the in and out information. So it, you know, and then the other thing is, like once you have that file that has the ranges that you need. And it can also be like if something shows up three times on a timeline, you can take just those three parts. You don't have to make three different trends. That's why this is really innovative because in the conventional, even the best trim workflow,

now you've got three files, right? For those three sections. And that's a new translation problem. Whereas in this kind of new concept of zeroing out the unused sections of the file, Resolve just sees one file. Those three areas are intact. Nothing else is wasting space. It's like you turned off the media offline, the flag, right?

It's like, we're just going to show you black instead of the media offline frame. I like that. Because black doesn't take any space. Right. Black doesn't take any space. All right. So that's pretty darn cool. I got to be honest with you.

I didn't know that was exactly how that worked. And that's pretty hip. So we've prepped the timeline exchange. We've sort of media managed, for lack of better term, trimmed. with ITO. Now, ITO is also going to allow us to facilitate the actual send, right? So we can just say, hey, this is going to. And what happens on that end? They receive just a download link. They receive a zip. Like, what does the other side look like? Yeah, they receive downloaded files and you can do all this in the browser. That was the other thing I was going to say is like,

this isn't using compute really because you're not trimming in the. So yeah, it's just figuring out the math and where the ones and zeros are, right? It's, it's working sort of like below. the codec level at the byte level so you can do all of this it just imagine it's like you know you only want to upload this part of the file but then that file still sort of works as if it was the original and then you're only downloading the file at that smaller disk usage size and so the transfer becomes you know two gigs instead of a hundred gigs or whatever and the download becomes that as well So it saves a bunch of times. It saves a bunch of storage.

And the way this works currently is like if you have an XML, you just pull that into our browser tool. It parses those in and outs. And then it just starts uploading those files. And then that becomes a package. You say who you want to send that to and they can just download it from there. So this is, I'm actually pretty stoked about this. In some ways, no offense, in some ways more than the even the timeline. fixes because this solves like a really big problem. And I'm guessing this is sort of differentiated

by like the plan you're on. Right. So like you guys have like your indie, we'll talk about this before we wrap, but sort of your indie professional studio plan. So like I get different bandwidth allocations depending on what sort of plan I'm on. Yeah. So yeah. So each different plan comes to like a different amount of data that you can send. And then there's like a small over. So it's like you're not limited from not sending more. It's not going to just stop. You'll just get it. You'll just get it. You'll just get all the additional. So I got. Yeah. That's the plan right now. All right, so we got timeline exchange ITO transfer, then sort of the sort of third module, I guess, or third part of this, the conform connect. Explain that bit is like, so you have this sort of desk, or it's coming, I guess, sort of this desktop tool that sort of connects all these, these things together.

Yeah. So we're getting really close to getting that out into the world. So basically it's kind of like, you know, it's providing this hub where you can use, you know, timeline exchange and ITO through this desktop app. And then it has this other section that we're calling conform connect that basically is directly connecting to resolve and just giving really powerful tools inside this app. And sometimes we have like a little floating windows. So you can have just like a little tiny thing over your interface to do specific things. I think one of the things we're most excited about is we're calling like Edit Index Plus. I don't know how many times we've wanted to be able to like flag a clip from the Edit Index or just use that as as a more powerful tool.

So we kind of built that where it can just do crazy searches and filtering. and then you know, you can just do batch operations on all of these clips that you select. So I think it's like super useful for conform for grade management, you know, VFX pulls and stuff like that. It's just a really powerful tool set that like we keep adding stuff to as we're like, oh, it would be cool if it could do this. Now it can do that. And so it basically will kind of update live with whatever's in your timeline. And then, you know, there's a lot of like useful conform tools in there as well of like, you know, I need a sequence with handles. for VFX polls or this is like, you know, we've been having some of our workflows

involve a lot of magic masks and they're going to flame and like we only want one copy of media even though we have a 90, 60, a 30, 15, 6 is 10, 6 is, you know, like 10 5s. And so we'll, we'll create this like all clips timeline, kind of like that, uh, you remember like the master timeline. Like the master timeline except a lot smarter. Love the master timeline anymore. You know, it's like, I know there's a way to reenable, but I can't find it. But this.

And you might not want it enabled for all your projects, right? Or for the whole project. You might want to just do it for this transfer. So we basically built this thing and it'll kick out this timeline. It's just the clips of the in and outs with handles if you want them. And it'll kick it out at like, this is your 8K resolution clips, your 6K, your 4K, you know, and it'll kind of create all that stuff to kind of help with some of these round trip problems that we've had of going. Because sometimes we'll do color and it gets online somewhere else or like it's going to flame or it's going to premiere or whatever.

So it's just a whole slew of tools to kind of help with that. another one we have in there that we're excited about. It's like kind of an image alignment tool. So it's like, you know, here's your reference and here's your clip. You know, if timeline exchange didn't nail it, then it's like here's a thing to kind of help you get it into place quickly. It can't do keyframes yet because of limitations and resolve, but we're working on trying to like find our way around that stuff. Those are some of the big ones. I'm sure there's a couple others in there too.

But it's a really, oh, there's like a great marker utility with a bunch of tools. But it's a really helpful companion of just like these are things that like, well, save real time. And so it's like, you know, I love. I looked at when I first saw the conform connect like feature list, I'm like, oh, I wrote a half-assed script to do something just like that, but it only really works on my machine and it only works at one frame rate. And I didn't go through the process of really actually turning it into something reusable. I just used it to solve one project's problem. This is going to save time for all projects.

Yeah. And I think it's coming from like these are problems we've had to, faced time and time again. And then you're like, these stuff, it's like, how do we solve this stuff? Because it's like the more time we can solve with these tools, it's like, then we can go and do the creative person to perform. I think that's a really, really kind of a big important distinction for our audience to understand and for your market to understand is that like, you know, you have professional software developers who make tools because, hey, we can make a buck doing software, but they're not necessarily boots on the ground, operators sitting behind the desk every day. And I think that's one of the reasons that I'm,

I'm sort of really attracted to this product because I know how hard you guys work. And I know the efforts that you take running a facility and the projects that go through there. And it's like, no, these are real world. Like in some ways you understand the problems better than a developer could really ever understand the problems. Because it's all just conceptual to the guy, you know, doing the programming, right? I mean, no offense, stuff on. But like, it's, you know, having like the experience these things, you're like, Oh, no, the math is doing this one thing, but it really works this way.

And that experience is invaluable, right? You can't replace that with just, oh, another argument in the code kind of thing. So that's cool. Let me ask you this. So right now, the timeline exchange I-2O transfer, you have the ability to do on the web. Conform Connect will have a desktop version soon. But there's no like real, I don't have like a better term, like super processing going on yet with the tool. Right. We're not, we're not like having to, whatever, scale up with new GPUs or whatever.

Like that kind of stuff might be later down the road. But like right now, it's all more just kind of math-based translation. Yes? Yeah. I mean, I think the Thailand exchange and ITA to stuff is like it's, it's like it's super efficient at this point. Like, like we've. Oh, and I'm sure it's very, I didn't mean to make it seem like it's simple. I'm sure it's very specific. I'm just saying, but like the first, the first versions of it like, you know, before like Stefan optimized it. like it would take more time to process the translation than it would to do it by hand. You know, but that was just like that's part of that learning like the programming and

optimization and finding where there's these recursions and things like that. And so now it's like, you know, working really, really efficiently. I think that's kind of where the desktop app comes in because like there are things that we're looking to do with kind of like this, that kind of like image recognition and kind of reconforming kind of stuff, you know, that's like that desktop app will give access to real processing power on your machine to do some of that stuff. Because I think there's some stuff that like pushing all that media up to the cloud to do that is totally possible.

But it's just like that's just so much time and cost and all that stuff. So we're going to try and leverage that stuff. But like for the tools right now, they don't really need much. You know, so it's like that desktop app is kind of preparing for that of what that stuff that's going to come that will need that. But a lot of what we're doing probably isn't going to have the craziest lift that's going to make you go by a Blackwell, 6,000. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right, right. I got you. So, you know, you get these tools out into the wild and people start using them. Where do you see, I mean, you mentioned a couple of them, some of the image recognition stuff or whatever. I'm guessing, like, this is one of those things where the game now, now that you've got sort of the core build, it's going to be where are the edge cases, right? And getting feedback from users about sort of their workflows and where things could, you know, potentially break down a little bit, that kind of stuff. because I think that's one of the, we talk a lot on this show about proper software testing, how to give proper feedback.

If you could, you know, people who are listening to this and want to give it a shot, what would you tell them in terms of, hey, this is the kind of feedback that really helps us improve the tool? Because I think a lot of people just go, oh, well, make it just like this and never really think about the further implications of that. So what kind of feedback is most helpful for you guys at this stage of the game? detail. You know, I think for, we've got like a little private beta going for the app and like there's a form that we're like sending out to people that's just like it's super detailed of just like trying to

capture as much data as possible, like including like screenshots or screen captures where possible. And I think like that's on the app, that's probably a little more intense on the kind of timeline exchange and I2O part. It's like if you can send us your project file, if you're allowed to, that really helps us understand what might have happened. And you know, because basically we're not, you know, we're not seeing people's media in timeline exchange or I2O. You know, it's It's like it's all just this information that's being parsed. So, you know, we don't, we don't really have a lot of visibility into that stuff. So it's like we need people to be able to provide that to us so we can help solve those problems.

And we fortunately have a lot of stuff come through the shop. So we've determined a lot of like edge cases already. But everyone has a unique workflow and process and everyone does things in their own way. So, you know, the more that we can learn and like we're getting some feedback now of like some issues that we're like solving. And so it's just, you know, if we don't know about it, we can't solve it. So it's just, yeah, hopefully people are just reaching out when they have an issue and we can solve it pretty quickly. Yeah.

And I think it's, it's really interesting to me, guys, that, you know, you put this through the paces enough where you're using it in your day-to-day workflows, which I think says a lot about sort of the power of the who, because I mean, like, a lot of people like come up with tools and like, are you using this? No, we're using a modified in-house version. Like, you guys are using this version to get, you know, your daily workflow done. And I think that says a lot about the power of the tool. So tell us about what's where people can find information about conform tools.

We're the best place to follow. I know there's obviously the website at conform. Dot tools. You have a Discord server. You guys are going to be at NAB as well. Tell us a little bit about the next month or so where people can go to find more out about this, where they can find you at NAB, etc. Yeah.

I think right now we're really kind of just starting our kind of like marketing efforts. And, you know, we're post folks. So it's like marketing is kind of a new thing for us. But, you know, we're, yeah. But yeah, we're really excited about NAB. We're going to sponsor the colorist mixer, and we're going to kind of give away a couple, like, year-long subscriptions there as kind of like one of the raffle prizes.

And then, you know, we're going to be on the show floor. We're probably going to be hanging around the FSI booth. You know, I think we're on Instagram and stuff like that, but, like, you know, we're going to be around. So, you know, Stefan and I and Ted or other partner is going to be kind of just out there on the floor just kind of answering questions and trying to spread the word. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, so I would do everybody go right now, go over a conform dot tools and check out the offerings there. You can check out pricing in the different subscription tiers. Check out timeline exchange and I-2O transfer. I mean, I have to say that I think a lot of people have dabbled in this space, but have given up for the complexity. And so I just, I think it's cool that you guys have kind of stuck with a little bit too, because I'm sure in the development process, some of these challenges were like at times you want to just put your head through a wall, right? Because it's like, it's It's not really well documented.

You sort of have to trial and error, figure this out. Like, it's got, it's had to have been a process to get to this point, I'm guessing. Yeah. And I think for us, it's like, this is a, a space that there's a lot of time spent doing it. Or people are, are using other ways to sort of get around the problem. And it's like, we have these tools already, but we just feel like this whole conform area is like, traditionally, like, people have. the XML and then they're like, oh, we need a better one. And then they made this other one.

And then they're like, you know what? Let's make a third one. And then they keep making them. But it's like the programs don't really care about making them talk to each other. So we feel like it's a place where we can really help out, especially with the things that we've figured out. Very cool, guys. Well, hey, man, thanks so much for joining us. I'm stoked to really, like, I've been dabbling, but I'm really like after this conversation,

I'm like, I'm pretty energized to be like, oh, yeah, we got to get, we got to get into this more. So be sure to head over to conform. Tools where you can check out the different modules here, timeline exchange, I2, a transfer, obviously check out pricing. You can follow the guys on their Instagram. There's also a good Discord community. If you get into testing the tool out, I know I've been flipping through the Discord, learning a little bit about the tool where, you know, people are having, you know, some feature requests, that kind of stuff.

It's a great community to be a part of. And I think that, you know, if you're at anybody, this year, definitely go hang out and catch up with these guys. Like as thank you said, they'll be at the colorist mixer. They're sponsoring that. They'll be at the FSI booth occasionally and I'm sure just walking around the floor. So if you do see either one of these guys, please stop them, give them a high five for creating such an awesome tool.

And I'm sure they would both love to talk conform, talk about how conform tools can help you on your next project. So guys, thanks so much for joining us. We're really, really stoked to not only have you on board as a sponsor, but I think just the community is better off for smart dudes like you thinking about stuff like this and then putting out a tool. So very appreciative on that front too. Yeah, thank you guys. It's been awesome. So as just a reminder for the rest of our audience here, if you can always follow the Offset Podcasts on Instagram or Facebook, you can head over to Offsetpodcast.com where you can see

our complete library of shows. We are above 50 episodes now. I think this is episode 52 or 53. So it's a growing library of stuff talking about all sorts of subjects. And we'd really appreciate it if you'd consider heading over to this link on screen right here to buy us a cup of coffee. Every dollar donated there goes to support the show, help us pay our editor, overhead costs, etc. So anything you can do, we really appreciate that. And of course, over at the offsetpodcast.com, there is an ideas button at the top of the page. If you have an idea for an episode, something you want Joey and I to discuss and take a look at, please drop us a line there.

We'd love to get your feedback, or if there's anything else we can be improving on, you can use that. that form as well. So for The Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.