Dailies - Contents

Contents

Many films have one main film unit which does all primary filming and one or more smaller film units shooting additional "pickup" shots, stunts, or shots involving special effects. These shots are included with the main unit footage on the dailies reels. A typical pickup shot might be a shot of a hand picking up a book. To save time and money the shot may be filmed with smaller crew and a different person's hand used as a substitute for the real actor's hand.

If a unit shoots with more than one camera usually all the shots from one "A" camera will be followed by all "B" camera shots because of the way the dailies are processed.

To save time, ordinarily only a small amount of the previous day's footage is viewed. If viewing dailies on video, often all the footage is transferred and the viewer can fast-forward as desired. Dailies on print film are more expensive to produce and cannot be easily fast-forwarded. In this case, during shooting the director will specify which takes he or she wants converted to dailies. When a take is completed, the director yells, "Cut" and if the director wants the take converted to dailies, the director will also yell, "Print". Once the director yells, "Cut! Print!", the script supervisor, the camera assistant and the sound person circle the take number on their log sheets so that only these circle takes will be printed that night by the film laboratory.

The end of a dailies reel may contain sound that was recorded without simultaneous picture recording called wild sound.

Visual effects shots are often assembled daily for viewing by a visual effects or animation supervisor. They will contain the previous day's work by animators and effects artists in various state of completion. Once a shot is at the point where additional feedback from the director is needed they will be assembled and screened for the director either as part of the normal dailies screening or as a separate weekly VFX dailies screening.

Dailies delivered to the editing department will usually have timecode and keycode numbers overlaid on the image. These numbers are used to later assemble the original high-quality film and audio to conform to the edit. Depending on how the dailies are produced, these numbers may only be on the editor's copy of the dailies or on all copies of the dailies.