Online / Conform Editor

What they do

The offline cut is a rehearsal made of proxies, temp shots and placeholder titles. The conform editor rebuilds it for real. Working from an EDL, AAF or XML plus the assistant's turnover notes, they relink every event to camera original media, resolve the retimes, reframes, speed ramps and dissolves that did not translate, and drop in the approved visual effects versions in place of temp comps. Anything editorial faked gets rebuilt properly: split screens, stabilisation, screen inserts, beauty fixes, dirt and rig removal, and the small paint jobs nobody wants to send to a vendor. Then the finishing layer: main and end titles, lower thirds, localisation-ready textless backgrounds, and legal cards. The output side is a specification exercise. A show has a master and then a family of deliverables, each with its own resolution, frame rate, colour encoding, audio configuration and file wrapper, plus archival masters that preserve the graded data rather than a display-referred version of it. The conform editor runs QC on all of it, fixes what QC finds, and keeps the version trail so a note three weeks later does not mean rebuilding from the top. Much of the day is comparing two images very carefully and finding the one frame that is wrong.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• How each offline event is rebuilt at full resolution, including retimes, reframes and transitions the offline only approximated
• Which visual effects version is in the master, and that the versions in the master are the approved ones
• Small fixes done in finishing versus shots pushed back to a visual effects vendor
• Title and text treatment placement, and how textless material is prepared for localisation
• Deliverable specifications in practice: resolution, frame rate, wrapper, audio layout, and what the archival master preserves
• Whether a QC failure is a real fault in the master or an artefact of the QC path

Principles of the craft

• The offline is a description, not a source. Every event in it is a claim about what should happen, and each claim has to be verified against the original. Trusting a relink because it looked right at proxy resolution is how a wrong take reaches a master.
• Compare, do not remember. Put the offline and the conform on top of each other in difference mode and step through. The eye is unreliable across two viewings and completely reliable at spotting a difference matte that is not black.
• Preserve the data, deliver the display. The version approved in the room is display-referred and standard-specific. An archival master rendered without the output transform is what allows the show to be remastered later without regrading it.
• Every deliverable is a contract with numbers in it. Frame rate, active picture, audio channel order, loudness and wrapper are not preferences. Read the spec for the specific platform before rendering, not after QC fails.
• Fix at the right altitude. A tracked patch in finishing is cheaper than a vendor round-trip, and a shot that needs a real rebuild is more expensive to patch badly twice than to send out once.

Common mistakes

• Relinking by clip name and assuming it worked, rather than checking timecode and reel against the camera report
• Losing a frame at every dissolve or retime because the offline application and the conform application round differently
• Baking titles into the master with no textless pass, which blocks every localised version
• Rendering to the wrong colour encoding because the conform session was not configured to match the grading session
• The experienced conform editor's mistake: quietly fixing a shot that should have gone back to the vendor, so the note is never recorded and reappears in the next version
• Treating automated QC as sufficient, or as authoritative, without an eyes-on pass

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Cut something at proxy resolution with retimes, a speed ramp, a stabilised shot and two dissolves. Export an EDL and an AAF, conform both in a different application from originals, and difference each against the offline. Count the frames you lost and find out which operation lost them.
• Build the same short piece as three deliverables: a Rec.709 SDR master, an HDR master, and a textless version with a separate titles pass. Write down every parameter you had to set. That list is a deliverables spec, and you now know why they are long.
• Take a graded piece and render both a display-referred master and an archival pass with no output transform. Reopen the archival pass a week later and produce a second display standard from it without touching the grade.
• Do a paint fix by hand: remove a rig, a boom shadow or a road sign from a fifty-frame moving shot, tracked, with no visible edge. Then time yourself. This is how you learn what belongs in finishing and what belongs at a vendor.
• Run a piece through a free automated QC tool, then watch it end to end yourself at full size. Note what the tool missed and what it flagged that was fine.