Workflow guide
There are three ways to get a Premiere timeline into Resolve: export an XML (the old Final Cut Pro 7 format), export an AAF (built for Avid), or read the .prproj itself. The first two are translations, and translations lose things — some of them quietly. Konformista reads the project file and rebuilds the timeline inside Resolve. Here is what survives each route, and how the grade gets back.
Cuts and trims come across on any route. The table is about everything else.
| In your timeline | XML / AAF | Konformista · .konform |
|---|---|---|
| Cuts, trims, track layout | Come across | Come across |
| Speed ramps | Wrong, or gone | Full retime graph reconstructed, flagged for a check |
| Position, scale, rotation | Often reset | Carried across |
| Mismatched resolutions — 4K in an HD timeline | Punched-in or re-framed — "Scale to Frame Size" leaves no trace in the XML | Fit policy read from the project; Resolve's mismatch setting configured to match |
| Transitions | Whatever isn't a cross dissolve usually becomes one, unannounced | Dissolves, dips and fades map natively; Morph Cut becomes Smooth Cut; the rest fall back to a dissolve and are flagged |
| Multichannel audio | Routing mangled, or clips offline | Routing preserved; crossfades rebuilt natively |
| Nested sequences | Broken apart or offline — a reference Resolve can't follow | Rebuilt as timelines you can open |
| Multicam | Offline, unless you flatten every clip by hand first | Flattened for you to the live angle — switches survive as cuts |
| Mixed frame rates — 23.976 / 29.97 / 59.94 | In/out points shift on mixed-rate cuts | Exact |
| Markers and clip colors | Hit and miss | Carried through, plus every preflight flag as a marker |
| Warp Stabilizer, clip effects | Dropped, silently | Dropped too — but every affected clip is flagged, so you know what to rebuild |
| Graphics, adjustment layers | Missing or offline | Disabled placeholders that hold their slot |
| The media itself | Ship everything, or relink by hand | Trimmed to the frames used plus handles — or sent straight to Resolve |
| The grade coming back | Relink and rebuild by hand | A graded .prproj — same edit, graded masters |
A flag means "look here", not "broken". Each one says what it means and what to do in Resolve. The full catalog is in the docs.
The whole workflow
Konformista
Konformer · Tools · Review · Kontroller
Konformista
Not directly — Resolve doesn't read .prproj files. You either export an XML or AAF from Premiere and accept the losses that come with them, or use a tool that reads the project file itself. Konformista does the latter. Premiere doesn't need to be installed on the machine running the conform.
Time remapping lives in the Premiere project as keyframes. The XML export approximates them, then Resolve interprets that approximation in its own retime model, and the errors compound into wrong frames on screen. Konformista reads the original keyframes and reconstructs the full retime graph in Resolve, then flags the clip so you can play it against the reference.
A Premiere multicam clip is a nested sequence under the hood, and the XML hands Resolve a reference it can't follow. The usual workaround is flattening every multicam clip by hand before export. Konformista flattens them for you — each section becomes the angle that was live, so switches survive as ordinary cuts. Effects applied to the multicam container itself don't transfer, and those clips get flagged.
Premiere's "Scale to Frame Size" does its fit invisibly — the clip's Scale still reads 100% — so the XML carries no record of it, and Resolve applies its own mismatched-resolution setting on top. 4K shots in an HD timeline land punched-in or re-framed. Konformista reads the fit policy from the .prproj itself, converts each clip's scale to Resolve's basis, and sets Resolve's mismatch behavior to match. Any clip whose framing had to be inferred is flagged for a check against the reference.
Render the graded shots, drop the delivery on Konformista's Hub, and it writes a new .prproj pointing at the graded masters. Same edit, same effects and audio, graded picture. Each pass is versioned, so a second delivery never overwrites the first.
No. With trimmed media switched on, the .konform package carries only the frames the edit uses, plus handles — same file names, same timecode, no quality loss. Konformer unpacks ordinary online media at the other end. Stills, graphics and anything unsafe to trim travel whole.
No — it works with the free Resolve too. On Free you import the self-contained package by hand; Studio adds one-click import, live clip navigation and automatic renders. Either way: Resolve 18.0 or newer, macOS or Windows.
A cuts-only timeline at a single frame rate — no nests, no retimes, no multicam — travels fine as XML. Konformista writes a plain .xml as a fallback for exactly that case.
Konformista is free during the beta. Konformer, the import side, is a free download either way.