The Cargo Cult Matchbox Plug-in

Change Management plug-in for progressive post production professionals

The Cargo Cult Matchbox is a Change Management solution, aimed at anyone working in post production. It compares two versions of a reel or episode and finds every cut change, VFX tweak or dialog slip. It reveals the differences, reporting on the damage, and then retimes your sound mix, compositing work, dialog scripts, closed captions, and anything else created to picture.

Matchbox inherits a lot from Conformalizer 4, our Emmy Award winning reconform tool for sound editors, but is a complete rethink of what Change Management can be. It's a completely new product, designed from the ground up using cutting edge tech and hand-rolled algorithms.

Matchbox Key features

• Tracks VFX shots as they evolve
• Powerful Marker system
• Not reliant on pix dept. change notes
• Localized in several different languages: 日本語 - 中文 - Français - Español
• Export for Media Composer
• Broad support for modern file formats
• Tailor reconforms to each dept.
• See changes in plain language
• Reconform for Nuke/Hiero

Compare based on… almost anything

If you have any kind of handover from picture editorial, then you have enough. Matchbox can work with AAFs, EDLs, XML, change notes, as well as the actual reference video files and the guide audio.

Just dump it all into Matchbox and ask it to Matchup anything it can find. You can search the dialog guide audio, video tracks, audio tracks, the reference movie file, or any combination in between.

Audible and Visible Diffing

Matchbox will hunt broadly, widely, even desperately to find matches for all the footage in the new reel. But then it switches gears, looking really carefully for any little differences within all those areas of matched footage.

You can then step through each purple Diff object, eyeballing (or earballing) each moment, and decide for yourself if it matters to you.

Human friendly summaries

Sure, Matchbox can automate the reconform process, but for the humans in your crew, you first want to know what the damage is, in plain terms, and in a format you can understand at a glance.

Matchbox will summarise the changes, even bundling up the relevant information into an email you can share with the whole post team.