Picture rarely locks on the day the schedule says it will. A note comes back from the client, a shot is replaced, two frames come off the head of a scene, and the conform that was signed off yesterday no longer matches the cut. That is normal. The problem is not the change itself — it is finding out about it three days later, in the grade, with the master due on Friday.
What follows is the checklist we run on every job that comes in with an offline from another cutting room. None of it is clever. It is the set of checks that has caught the most expensive mistakes for us.
Assume the cut will change after lock. Build the conform so that finding out costs an hour, not a day.
Studio handbook
1. Match the timeline before you match the media
Before relinking anything, compare the exported edit list against the reference movie of the approved cut. Event count, total runtime and the timecode of the first and last frame of every reel. If those three disagree with the reference, the list is from a different version of the cut and nothing downstream is worth doing yet.
2. Keep a frame-accurate reference of every version
Every cut that leaves editorial gets a burned-in reference with source timecode and a version number in the corner. When a change arrives, the two references can be compared directly and the differences listed in minutes rather than guessed at.
3. Conform from originals, never from the offline media
Offline runs on low-resolution copies so that the cutting room stays fast. The conform has to go back to the camera originals, and the checksums recorded at ingest are what proves the originals are the same files that were copied on set.
4. Track effects separately from cuts
Speed ramps, reframes, stabilisation and any temporary effect applied in the offline should be listed on their own, with the shot they belong to. They are the first thing lost in a re-conform, and the last thing anyone notices is missing.
5. Re-run the check after every change, not once at the end
A change list that arrives during the grade is applied to the conform and then the whole comparison is run again. It takes a few minutes when it is automated and it is the only way to be sure that fixing one shot has not shifted the ones after it.
None of this removes late changes from the schedule. It just means that when they arrive — and they will — the answer to "does the master still match the approved cut?" is a report rather than an opinion.
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