Camera Logs

The Camera Logs tab replaces the paper camera log a 1st AC or script supervisor keeps on set. Every take is one row: scene, slate, take, lens, stop, filter and whatever else you choose to track. Entries group by shoot day on screen and by shoot day → camera → roll in the exported camera report. Smartfill carries setup metadata forward so only what actually changed has to be typed, and the lens and filter suggestions come from the project's own requirements rather than a list you maintain by hand.

Showing the tab

Where it lives: Camera Logs is a per-project tab, on by default for a new project. Show or hide it in the project's tab settings; it sits in the project workspace alongside Call Sheets and the Daily Shooting Report.
Camera Logs vs. Daily Shooting Report: Camera Logs is one row per TAKE — the running log kept during the day. The Daily Shooting Report is one document per SHOOT DAY summarising cameras, cards and totals. They are complementary: log takes here, summarise the day there.

Logging takes quickly

Smartfill: "Add entry" opens pre-filled from the last entry on the camera you are viewing: roll, magazine, scene, lens, stop, filter, ND, FPS, shutter, ISO, white balance, LUT and media all carry forward, and the take number is already incremented. Clip, timecode, notes and the circle mark stay blank because they describe this take only.
Quick log — one-tap takes: The quick-log bar above the table is the on-set fast path: pick your camera letter chip once, then every tap of "+ Take N" commits a fully Smartfilled row — setup carried forward, take number incremented, body resolved from the camera package — with no modal. "Circle last take" stars what you just shot. The full Add-entry dialog remains the path for a new setup, where the fields genuinely change.
Duplicate for next take: The row action does the same thing from a specific row rather than the latest one — useful when you go back and continue from an earlier setup.
Lens and filter suggestions: The lens box shows the focals of the current lens set as one-tap chips — a tap fills the lens AND the focal length together. With more than one set in the project, a set picker sits beside the chips and the choice is remembered per project. Sets come from the project's own lens requirements; a project that lists none falls back to the device catalog, so the picker is never empty. Filters and ND come from the camera package's mattebox. All of it is suggestion only: every field stays free text, so a lens swapped in on the day is still loggable.
Shot number: The Shot column records which planned shot a take covers — distinct from the slate, in the numbering your shotlist already generates (12.3, 12.A…). Hidden by default; the Digital preset carries it. Smartfill takes it to the next take while the take number keeps incrementing. Free text like every field. The field now suggests the project’s planned shot numbers from the shotlist — in shotlist order — and a "Shot coverage" line above the table counts which planned shots have at least one take, naming the ones still missing. Coverage counts every logged take, not just the filtered view.
T-stop in tenths: The T-stop box carries a stepper that reads like the ARRI viewfinder: pick a whole stop (T1–T32) and step in tenths — the row stores the canonical form, e.g. “T2.8 3/10”, so the column, the exports and the printed report stay comparable. The field itself stays free text: a lens marked in f-stops or an unusual barrel value (T1.3) is still typed straight in.
Camera-to-subject distance: The Distance column records the focus pull — the one continuity number a re-shoot or a VFX plate match needs and the footage cannot reconstruct. It is hidden by default: enable it via Columns or the Film preset. A chip above the field carries your project's unit (metres or feet, from the project settings): tapping it completes a bare number ("3,6" → "3.6 m") or converts a value logged in the other unit ("12 ft" → "3.7 m"). The field stays free text, so "13'6"" or "behind the dolly" is still loggable.
INT/EXT and Day/Night: Two columns record what a continuity sheet carries beside the scene: interior/exterior and day/night. Hidden by default (enable via Columns or the Film preset). The suggestions are the same vocabulary the location pages use — INT · EXT · INT/EXT and DAY · NIGHT · DAY/NIGHT — so takes stay comparable with your locations, and Smartfill carries both to the next take. The fields stay free text: a crew that writes T/N keeps writing T/N.
Rig: The Rig column records how the take was operated — Handheld, Tripod, Dolly, Slider, Steadicam, Gimbal, Easyrig, Crane/Jib, Drone, Car mount, Underwater — the detail that explains a stop change or answers "which setups were on the gimbal" at wrap. Hidden by default (Columns or the Film preset), carried forward by Smartfill, and free text like every suggestion field: a rig the list does not name is simply typed.
Camera letters: The camera picker offers the project's own resolved camera letters, so A/B/C match the camera packages rather than a separate list.
Camera body: Body records which camera actually shot the take, not just its letter. Picking a camera letter fills the body in from that letter's camera package, so multi-cam days name an ALEXA 35 roll and a VENICE 2 roll apart. Swap a body mid-day and you can overtype it — the earlier takes keep the body they were shot on, because the value is stored per row, not looked up when the report is printed.
Standard values: FPS, shutter, ISO/EI, white balance, tint and aspect ratio all offer the values a camera report is written with — ISO in third stops, colour temps with the K, shutter by angle and by speed, delivery ratios narrow to wide. Frame rates are the same list the timecode sync uses. Anything you type that the standards do not carry is added to the end of that field’s list for the rest of the project, and every field stays free text.
My kit: My kit stores the lenses, bodies, filters and settings you actually shoot, saved to your account rather than to one project. Kit values are offered first in every picker, ahead of the standard list, on every project and every device you sign in on. Build it from the log itself — "Add this project’s values" folds in what the current project used, and any value can be removed with one tap. It only reorders suggestions; nothing is filtered out and every field stays free text.
Editing a take in place: Tap any value in the row and it becomes an input — type, press Enter, done. Blur commits too, Escape discards, and a value you did not actually change is not written at all. The suggestions are the same ones the full form offers, and the field stays free text either way. On the desktop table every visible column can be edited this way, empty ones included, so a blank cell is simply how you fill that field in. A phone card leads with what identifies the clip — camera letter, scene, slate, take, then roll and clip — plus the two or three values you scan for, and all of those are editable right there. Everything else, including every field still empty, sits behind the card's All fields toggle: open it and the rest of the take is editable in place too. The shoot day stays scannable and nothing is out of reach.

Choosing what to track

Presets: Columns → Presets seeds the visible set: Digital (clip, LUT, timecode, media), Film (magazine, no timecode), Minimal (scene, slate, take, lens, stop) or All. Pick the closest one, then refine per column.
Show, hide, reorder: Every field can be toggled and moved in the Columns dialog. The layout is saved per project, so a documentary and a commercial can track different things.
Available fields: Date, camera, body, rig, roll, magazine, scene, INT/EXT, day/night, slate, shot, take, clip, lens, focal length, distance, T-stop, filter, ND, FPS, shutter, ISO/EI, white balance, tint, LUT/look, aspect ratio, TC in, TC out, circle, media card and notes.
Pinned headers: On a desktop the table scrolls inside its own box, at most 70 % of the window tall, so the column names stay in view while you scroll through a long day of takes.

Timecode sync

What it does: Read the timecode off the slate or the camera's monitor once, type it into the Timecode sync panel with the frame rate, and press Start sync. This device then runs that counter forward on its own, so every take's TC In and TC Out can be stamped with one tap instead of typed from memory.
Syncing to the device clock (time of day): When the cameras are running time-of-day timecode — the usual setup on documentary and multi-cam work — this device's own clock is already the sync source, so press Time of day and nothing needs typing or reading. The frame rate you pick still matters: at 29.97 and 59.94 the drop-frame label is designed to track the wall clock and does, while non-drop at those rates genuinely runs about 3.6 seconds slow per hour, which the app reproduces rather than hides. It is a sync like any other, so it still ages — re-press it if the panel says the sync is hours old, because a phone clock drifts too.
Scanning it with the camera: Press Scan to open a viewfinder and aim the band at the timecode on the slate or camera monitor. Several frames a second apart are read and cross-checked before anything is accepted — the hard part is not an unreadable display but a single wrong digit, and 1O:00:58:12 looks as convincing as 10:00:58:12. A scan is refused with a reason rather than accepted: “that counter is not running” means the display is paused, “the reads disagree” means a likely misread digit, “could not read a timecode” means the band held none. The sync is dated to when the frame was captured, not to when you confirm, so checking the value first costs nothing. On a device with no camera the Scan button does not appear, and declining the permission prompt is reported as a choice rather than a failure.
Listening for LTC from a timecode box: Press Listen to decode SMPTE linear timecode straight off a timecode box — hold the phone to its speaker, or run its output into the headphone/mic socket. Two seconds are decoded and every frame cross-checked, so a dropout is refused rather than trusted. This is the accurate path where the OCR scan is the convenient one: LTC carries the timecode digitally, so there is no misread digit to guard against. Three refusals tell you what to change: “no audio is reaching the microphone” means level or placement, “it is not timecode” means the box is sending word clock or audio instead of LTC, and a rate mismatch means the signal is running at a different frame rate than the one selected — the app names the real rate and offers to switch to it in one tap, because syncing at the wrong rate drifts a few frames every minute and nothing on screen would show it. On a device with no microphone the Listen button does not appear.
Stamping a take: While a sync is running, the TC In and TC Out fields in the add/edit dialog each get a clock button. Tap it at the moment you want recorded — the value comes from the clock at the instant you tap, not from the counter shown on screen, so it is accurate even between display updates.
Frame rates and drop frame: Pick the rate the camera is actually running. 29.97 and 59.94 are drop-frame and are written with a semicolon before the frames (10:00:00;00); 23.976 runs slow but is NOT drop-frame. If the app refuses a timecode, it is because that rate cannot produce it — at 29.97 drop-frame the first two frame numbers of most minutes are skipped, so 00:01:00;00 never appears on a counter, while 00:10:00;00 does.
Why it asks you to re-sync: A sync is a snapshot of one moment, and device clocks drift. After four hours the panel warns you and shows the sync's age. Stamping still works — a four-hour-old sync beats typing — but re-reading the slate takes a few seconds and puts you back on frame.
It stays on this device: The running sync is not saved with the project and is not shared with collaborators: it describes this device's clock, so handing it to another phone would give that phone an offset it never measured. It also resets when you reload. The timecodes you stamp onto takes are ordinary row data and do save, sync and export as usual — including into the ALE file that DaVinci Resolve and Avid read.

On a phone

The header folds into More: Below 768 px the tab header keeps Add entry and folds Columns, My kit, Camera report, Export CSV, Export ALE and Export JSON into a More menu. Every entry keeps its written label and does exactly what the full-width button does; from tablet width up the full button row returns.
Timecode sync starts collapsed: On a phone the Timecode sync section shows one row: its title and the running timecode, or No sync when no clock is running. Tap the row to open the timecode field, the rate, Start sync, Time of day, Scan and Listen. A stale sync shows a warning icon on the collapsed row.
Takes render as cards: Below 640 px each take is a card led by the camera letter, the slate and the take, with the values you check against the slate underneath and everything else behind All fields. The table returns from tablet width up.

Circling takes

Circle a take: The circle mark is the printed take — the one post should cut with. Toggle it per row from the table or the card list.
Circle all: Circles every take currently in view. It respects the camera and day filters, so it never silently marks takes on days you are not looking at. Press it again to uncircle.
In the report: Circled takes print bold with a filled dot in your accent colour, and each camera block carries a takes/circled tally in its header.

Exporting the report

Camera report (PDF): A landscape camera report grouped by shoot day → camera → roll, one page per camera, with the project name, date, take and circled tallies, the crew credits, a table per roll and a signature line for logged-by and received-by. This is the end-of-day handoff document.
Header credits: Director, DoP, operator and 1st AC are read from the project's crew list by role, so the report credits the people already on the project — nothing extra to fill in.
Branding, logo and signature: The report picks up your branding accent colour, your logo (top-right of page one) and your saved signature — the same ones the quote, delivery note and return note use. Set them in Settings; the signature is stored once and reused across every document. Without a stored signature the report prints a blank signing line instead.
Export CSV: A spreadsheet export carrying ALL fields (not only the visible ones) in your column order, UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel reads umlauts correctly. Use it to import take metadata into a DIT tool such as Silverstack.
Export JSON: A machine-readable export of the same takes — typed (booleans stay booleans, dates stay ISO), versioned, and grouped by shoot day → camera → roll like the printed report. Use it for DIT tools, custom scripts or archiving; unlike CSV it never flattens types or loses the grouping.
What gets exported: Every export follows the current camera and day filters. Filter to one shoot day before exporting to produce that day's report on its own.
From the project's Export dialog: The same four formats are on the Camera Log tab of the project's Export dialog: choose the format and a shoot day (or all days), check the count of takes to export, then press Export Camera Log.

Backup status — can I wipe this card?

What the Backup line means: When the log names rolls and this project has been offloaded with the data management tool, a Backup line appears under the log. It reads how many rolls have a verified copy on a drive, and names every roll that does not.
What counts as copied: A roll only reads as copied when an offload finished AND reported no verification issues. A copy still running, a copy that failed, and a copy that completed with checksum mismatches each say so instead. A wrong “copied” costs footage, so the line never guesses.
Rolls it cannot judge: The roll on the log is matched to the card label on the offload exactly — A001 is not satisfied by A0011, and a copy of A001 from another camera does not count. Takes with no roll are counted separately, because nothing links them to a card.
When no line appears: Nothing is shown if no take names a roll, or if this project has never been offloaded. If the backup status could not be read at all, the line says so — that is not the same as everything being copied.
Drive count: When every logged roll is copied, the line lists how many drives hold each one. One drive is a copy, not a backup.

Storage and sync

Where entries live: Log rows are stored on the project, so they ride the same local-first storage, cloud sync and project export as the rest of the project. They work offline and sync when a connection returns.
Column layout: The column configuration is a per-project view setting. It is excluded from version snapshots, so restoring an older project version does not reset how you like the table laid out.

Help & Documentation