Scenario is you've onlined & graded a locked 60 min sequence on a monday. Turn up tuesday and the offline phones to say they made a few changes!!!! But that's not a problem because you can just relink the new sequence right??????????

Is there a way of tracking changes between two sequences i.e recut seq & onlined seq that enables you to conform the recut seq but with all your online work thus saving all the hard work you've done already. At the moment I'm just ganging the seq's together & looking for a difference then manually cutting in the changes. Help.

Dan,

Its a bit late but; Tell them next time to make a dummy (i.e. containing no media) clip of the show.

Put this in the timeline under their existing clips and lock the tracks. After they hack they can give you an edl of the dummy track and you can re-conform from that track adding any new clips that weren't in the original cut, as can be seen by missing bits of the dummy track in the sequence.

Gosh, that sounds a lot more complicated than it works out when you actually do it.

I always put a dummy track audio into a sequence when it is "locked" as many DAW's allow you to re-conform any tracklaying that has been done automatically to the new cut using an EDL of the dummy track.

Thanks for the reply. That does solve any cuts or extends but there maybe edit trims, shot changes or new fx added that dont effect duration. Apparantley avid has software called Change Notes which may help. Im going to look into it. Have you come across this?

I have looked at Change Notes but my limited brain could not cope with the concept.

Your way, though laborious, is probably the best.

Depending on what version of software you're using, if you decompose a copy of the new sequence with the *exact same* handle length as in your conformed version, you may luck out and have some of the material in your conform reling to the "new" sequence.

Of course, your effects won't magically beam themselves over, but it's a starting point.

The bigger issue is that this is poor planning on your client's part. Once they've delivered a locked sequence to you, they should step away from their offline system. The offline edit is OVER.

On the bright side, I hope you're charging them by the hour.