Reconform Faster and More Reliably with The Cargo Cult Matchbox 2
Film and TV sound professionals rely on Matchbox for tracking picture changes, and with the release of Matchbox 2 and Pro Tools 2025.6, they can now enjoy dramatically faster, more precise reconform. “Smart-Conform” is now available to Pro Tools users, bringing fine-grained, clip-wise reconform, leveraging Avid’s new Scripting API.
It’s about Time. Time taken out of the cut. Time added back in. Time designing scenes that were removed, then reinstated next week. Time shuffling around, eye-matching, hunting for shots, and heart-breaking amounts of Time spent patching-up a reel which you’d already spent too much Time finessing.
Matchbox is designed to eliminate that pointless time-wasting and re-allocate those precious hours to the creative choices which only you can make.
At The Cargo Cult we have been working on this problem for over 20 years, and now with the arrival of the Pro Tools Scripting SDK (aka PTSL) we can affect changes in your Pro Tools session with unprecedented speed, reliability and accuracy; carefully updating your work with the delicate hand of an experienced sound editor.
Matchbox 2 is the next evolution of our battle-hardened change-management tool, and makes some huge leaps forward, particularly in the areas of video and audio matching, visual diffing, realtime feedback and most importantly, intelligent reconform.
MATCHBOX 2 FEATURES OVERVIEW
Integrated Pro Tools Reconform.
Gone are the old Matchbox Helper plugin and hacky keystroke-based reconform. Matchbox is now tightly integrated with Pro Tools, enabling rock solid, super fast reconforms as well as some powerful new tricks to help you get back up and running as fast as possible.
Smart-Conform for Pro Tools.
Smart-Conform is a way of looking at the reconform on a per-clip basis, allowing Matchbox to move things around more carefully, maintaining head and tail fades that overlap the cut, cleaning up all the little scraps of “conform shrapnel”, saving you hours (or days!) of tedious cleanup work after every recut.
Reconform Marker Tracks
Matchbox now adds a set of informative marker tracks, showing where insertions and deletions have occurred, where VFX have been added or where shots and scenes begin and end. Users can ask Matchbox to move different sets of markers between their dedicated track or the main ruler, creating a marker line across the whole session to highlight where VFX have been added.
Cue Pro Integration
Non-Lethal-Applications new Cue Pro tool is going to make spotting and recording ADR much easier and more intuitive, so of course you can now reconform the Cue Pro / ADR Master timelines directly from Matchbox, just as you would with your Pro Tools session.
Jump DAW between Old and New cuts
No matter where you are in your session, Matchbox can instantly jump you to the same shot in the previous cut. While patching up the reconform, you can quickly check how a scene was designed previously, and even copy/paste an entire event in perfect sync with the new cut.
Follow DAW Mode
The little yellow “footstep” button enables Follow-DAW mode, allowing Matchbox to chase the timeline position of Pro Tools while you edit, for a constant side by side comparison of the old and new pictures for whichever scene you’re working on.
If you’re ever worried that the VFX have changed the timing of your gunshots, just glance over at Matchbox and see every detail highlighted in bright red.
Solo Focus Mode
To aid in the patch-up process, we’ve created a new solo mode in Pro Tools, where anything you touch is immediately and automatically soloed. Just select a thing, hit play, and that’s what you’ll hear.
Vastly improved video matching
Matchbox is no longer fooled by colour grades, zoom, crop, rack, rotate and VFX updates. It’s really pretty shocking what it can match, meaning a video-only matchup is often at least as good as using EDLs or AAFs.
Redesigned Diffing engine
Visible and Audible diffs have been completely overhauled, allowing better tolerance of colour-grading, codec noise and insignificant audio level changes. There’s even a realtime threshold knob for filtering out the less important diffs.
Assemble Unmatched in DAW
For Dialog editors, a new version of the film usually means reconforming, then importing the new AAF to grab any audio clips recently added by the picture editor. This can be painstaking, and fraught with danger, lest you miss an offscreen line which the director has added to save the story.
Matchbox can now compare the old and new AAFs, then send any newly added audio straight to pro tools, laid up on tracks for you to start incorporating into the mix.
Match-Back to Production Audio
When you don’t even have an AAF, or it’s the nasty “embedded” kind with all metadata lost, it can be almost impossible to assemble the editor’s production audio timeline.
Matchbox can now match just a consolidated dialog guide track against your full production media collection, producing an arrangement which can then be sent straight to Pro Tools. You can even take a single line from the AAF and ask matchbox to find alt takes or utterances which sound similar. Yes, this is indeed the holy grail.
For the picture department we’ve added new workflows to solve some key pain points:
Automatic Eye-Matching for Video Editors
Take a rendered MP4 of a trailer edit and match it back to all the possible sources in your collection which match visually. Or perhaps you have an offline render of a TVC but no EDL detailing the shots used… Point Matchbox at the folder of shots and let it build the conform for you.
You can then export this timeline of options as an OTIO or EDL for ingesting into Media Composer or any other NLE. Eye-matching is a now a distant memory.
Conform Old Temp Mixes in Media Composer
Have you ever had the sound dept. deliver a nice cleaned dialog mix, only to discover they are already 2 versions behind the cutting room? Rather than manually eyeballing and trying to recreate all the edits, Matchbox can conform this out of date audio up to your current version. Export an EDL of the events in Matchbox, import into your NLE, then link those events back to the audio file.
A (very) full list of features and fixes can be found on the Matchbox web page:
https://www.thecargocult.nz/products/matchbox/matchbox-version-history/
Matchbox 2 is available now with a 15 day, full-featured free trial.
Upgrade options are available from both Matchbox 1 and Conformalizer, and discounted upgrades are offered for recent Matchbox purchasers, with a free upgrade within 3-months, or 50% discount within 6 months.
Matchbox 2 requires macOS 10.15 or greater, Win10/11, and the Pro Tools Scripting features require Pro Tools 2025.6.or later.
https://www.thecargocult.nz/products/matchbox/