Matchbox

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. (Requires PT25.6)

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. (Requires PT25.6)

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. (Requires PT25.6)

Cue Pro Integration

Non-Lethal-Applications new Cue Pro application 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 & 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. (Requires PT25.6)

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 & 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. (Requires PT25.6)

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. (Requires PT25.6)

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. (Requires PT25.6)

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 25.6. 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.

Generate an EDL from just a rendered reel
You heard that right. Matchbox can split a rendered reel into shots with source timecode and clip-names pulled straight from the image.If you ever find yourself needing this feature, you have be royalled screwed. But it happens right? Break glass in case of emergency.

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 requires macOS 10.15 or greater, Win10/11, and the Pro Tools Scripting features require Pro Tools 2025.6.x