The conform process is an essential part of post production, and provides both an excellent test case for a metadatabase driven workflow and a basis for the development of the concept of the virtual film factory. A new conform prototype within the existing Baselight application was developed to explore the benefits and optimal architecture for a distributed metadatabase.  A comparison with the current state-of-the-art shows the scope for parallelism in the new approach as well as the benefit of pre-processing metadata like the frame rate, derived from image file sequences rather than individual files, a calculation currently performed with considerable overhead. Many opportunities present themselves to exploit the vast performance improvements for enhancements of the non-linear finishing process as a whole, from late in-context decision making to more flexible versioning and a more interactive creative environment.