Sorry my bad.

Conform is the process of matching edits with the "master" edit, generally.

One of the odd things about the "movie pipeline" is that generally the thing thats passed between compmanies is not the actual edit, but an EDL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list) which is a loosegoosey format, horrible in _many_ ways.

But it means that you can assemble an edit from different media (ie proxies, or digital sources, or actual film.)

and thats the same everywhere.

in a finishing lab, you assemble the edit[1], and then apply a base grade. So you conform the edit, then "conform" the colour so the expensive colourist is not doing busy work infront of the director. Now, some labs might have different names for this, but where I worked, conform was the edit assembly (which was way more faff than you'd hope, EDL is a really really shit format for coordinating edits) then base grade/conform grade to make sure that everything was roughly a "neutral" grade. ie when you cut between two people talking at each other, one is not widly brighter/greener/darker than the other. In sound its like making sure the levels are the same between actors, so one isn't louder than the other.

This might also be called match grading, but from what I remember match grading was for VFX people trying make sure they were producing stuff that looked right.

Manual colour timing was pretty much dead back then, and that was 15 years ago. So going back and doing match/base/conform grade manually in film seems like a fucking stupid thing to do. So does doing a final grade as well, but as Nolan is the only director who manages to finish on time and budget reliably[2], perhaps I'll forgive his foibles. He seems to have actually done the final grade in analogue.

[1] the finishing lab can often be a different company to the editor, so they will need to transfer the raw footage and the EDL (or hopefully something more modern, EDLs were shit when I was there and that was 15 years ago)

[2] Every other director who's doing any amount of VFX seemed to always over run. they'd want clean up or changes weeks after the target end date. Nolan is the only director whos has 400+ VFX shots in a movie thats finished on time.