“Pic Ref” quicktime has audio. “Conform Ref” has tape/TC burnin, but never, ever, ever audio. So I mix and match.
This is more than one LA edit house too. What am I missing?
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I see a lot of times where the edit ref’s have audio but flame won’t read it. I believe this has to do with a newer codec being applied and if flame isn’t up to date won’t read the audio. I’ll send it through media encoder to get it all working. Happens a lot
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That was a good guess. But nope, these have empty audio tracks!
seems like sloppy prep then
Refs without audio is standard procedure for feature films sadly. There were so many times I was building movies that I thought were really good until we got the audio track! 
Come to think of it, I still have no idea what Blade Runner 2049 was about. . . Gonna have to watch that one someday, now that I think I’m finally over the PTSD!
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That’s interesting. Wonder if it’s some holdout prep an edit assist decided they needed for a laundry detergent commercial, and no one has been able to stop them.
I could see the value if it’s got all the repos pulled off as well, so you can easily check if your conform and timewarps are working without playing the “match the scale across time” game. I get those sometimes and they make me happy.
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Yep. Another example of non-sensical editorial shit. I get it for features but if you’re providing a ref with burnins and audio as well…
I get conform refs with audio - commercials - but I also see thing vary depending on editors / assistants
Never gotten pic with no audio for commercials. In response to the issue of sometimes flame not reading the audio, I’ve narrowed that down to someone making an mp4 with pcm audio instead of acc
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That’s the weirdness: I get both at the same time. Pic Ref with audio, Conform Ref without audio.
I like to work with the burn in, so that’s the worst of both worlds.
Ahhh , interesting!
Pic ref → the same file the client approved, with all gfx, and audio tracks on
conform ref → The cleaned timeline that they bounced the AAF / XML from
at least thats what i am seeign, and I actually preffer it that way, i dont want to have to delete a bunch of random audio tracks , rather the XML has none if you ask me.
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That’s kinda what I assume. But there’s still 2 empty audio channels in their “Conform Ref” quicktime. So I plop that down, and then grab audio off Pic Ref. They intentionally mute audio and it’s curious.
And then you get some sloppy XML prep with 48 channels of audio clips… and a bunch of clips 10 mins down the timeline for “alt takes” that the editor was keeping around…
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JUst because there’s an audio track doesn’t mean the aaf/xml will have them. I always get video only lists, but a mixed down audio track.