Shot Log / Dailies Notes Tool

Knowledge Base

Why a Shot Log Saves Editing Time

Without a log, your editor has to scrub through every take of every scene to find the good ones: with a log, they can filter straight to your 4-5 star takes and start cutting immediately. A few seconds of note-taking per take on set routinely saves hours in the edit bay.

What to Note in Real Time

• Rating: A quick gut-reaction star rating right after the take, while it's fresh, don't wait until the end of the day to rate everything from memory.
• Technical issues: Focus miss, boom in frame, camera shake, anything that rules a take out regardless of performance.
• Performance notes: "Best line reading" "energy dropped at the end" "watch for the laugh at 0:14", context your editor can't get from the footage alone.

Using the CSV in Your Edit

Import the exported CSV into a spreadsheet alongside your bin, or reference it directly while scrubbing dailies, sorting by rating instantly surfaces your best material before you've watched a single frame.

FAQ

Q: Should the whole crew have access to the log, or just one person?
A: Designate one person (often a script supervisor or AC) to own the log during the shoot, split logging responsibility usually leads to gaps and inconsistent notes.

Q: Does this replace a full script supervisor's continuity notes?
A: No. This is a lightweight ratings/notes log for editing triage, not a replacement for detailed continuity tracking on larger productions.

Logging as you shoot

Every minute spent logging on set saves several in the edit. An editor opening a folder of unlabelled clips has to watch everything before deciding anything, and on a shoot generating six hours of material that is a full day gone before the first cut. A log turns that day into an hour.

Star ratings do most of the work. Marking the take everybody agreed was the one, at the moment of agreement, preserves a judgement that otherwise evaporates by the following week. The traditional term is circling a take, from the days of marking the paper log with a circle, and modern equivalents do the same job.

Notes are more useful when they record why than what. Take 3 good says less than take 3, best performance, plane audible in the background. The second tells the editor to use the picture from three and find clean audio somewhere else, which is a decision they can make without hunting.

Record the problems as carefully as the successes. A take with a boom in frame, a continuity error or a focus miss is worth marking precisely so nobody spends twenty minutes rediscovering it. This matters most on the takes that were otherwise excellent, because those are the ones an editor will try hardest to use.

Log timecode rather than a running count where you can. Take numbers reset and get confused between cameras, while timecode is unique and matches what the editing software reads from the file. On a multi-camera shoot with synchronised timecode, one number locates the same moment on every camera at once.

Vocabulary

Take. One recorded attempt at a shot. Numbered sequentially, so scene 4 take 3 identifies a specific attempt at a specific shot and is the basic unit of everything logged on set.

Circled take. The take chosen on set as the preferred one, marked so the editor starts there. Named after the practice of drawing a circle on the paper log, and still the fastest way to carry a set decision into post.

Dailies. The footage from a shooting day, reviewed shortly afterwards to confirm it is usable. Watching dailies catches focus and exposure problems while the location and cast are still available.

Continuity. Consistency of detail across shots meant to appear continuous, such as which hand holds a cup. Errors are easy to create and expensive to fix, so noting them at the moment they happen is far cheaper than finding them in the edit.