Major Project: Dailies/Rushes Editing Research & Preparations

During the production/shooting of Double Exposure, my task was to create dailies/rushes for each scene filmed after each day of filming. Before shooting commenced and before I began however, I knew that it was important to conduct research into what exactly dailies/rushes are defined as, why they are created, how they are used, the best set-up and workflow to use, and the effect that they have on a production.

Overall Research

Dailies or Rushes?
The first area that I wanted to look into was the difference between dailies & rushes.

Dailies, known sometimes in the UK as Rushes "are prepared at the end of each day's shooting to be viewed by the director and other staff later that night or during the following day. This allows them to make sure the footage is acceptable and free of technical problems. If any scenes need to be re shot, it obviously makes sense to do it immediately while sets and actors are still available." [1]

- This is a fantastically clear way of describing the use of creating dailies during the production phase, explaining that when creating dailies I would be preparing them at the end of each day of filming and presenting them to the Director & Producer the following day, in order to decide whether shots or scenes need reshooting and whether the footage cuts together. Allowing for time to reshoot during production, instead of needing to set up expensive reshoots after filming has finished.

Rushes, however, are evidently a more old fashioned term, as they can be described as "the raw footage from a day's shooting. The "rush" refers to the speed with with the footage must be prepared — this was more of an issue in earlier days of movie-making when film footage needed to be processed before viewing." [2]

- Although dailies may often be referred to as rushes, the definition above and many similar definitions that I've found describe my task a lot less accurately, so the cuts that I would be creating and presenting during production can be best defined as Dailies instead of Rushes.

For further definitions and descriptions of dailies in film, I found more information on the term and process from other sources.

"All material shot in one day of productions is called dailies  ... Traditionally dailies are dropped off at the lab at the end of day and are available for screening the next morning." [3]

- The above description was useful in further clarifying the overall task of creating dailies.

In 'Cinematic Terms', Dailies are defined as: "the immediately processed, rough cuts, exposed film, or first prints of a film (w/o special effects or edits) for the director (producer, cinematographer, or editor) to review, to see how the film came out after the day's (or previous day's) shooting ... used to determine if continuity is correct, if props are missing or out of place, or if sound is poor, etc., to help decide whether to re-shoot." [4]

- This was another extremely useful extended explanation of the task, describing dailies as being a roughly cut, quick cut version of each day's scenes, without any special effects or special editing. Also described as being used to check for reshoots if continuity is incorrect or if their are technical issues.

Although I had a small amount of knowledge on the purpose of dailies before conducting the above research, the information that I learned was very helpful in giving me an understanding of the overall ways that dailies are cut (roughly, 'rushed' to meet time quotas), when they are created and presented (created after each day of filming, most commonly presented the next day), and their important purpose during production (checking camera shots, continuity, for any technical issues - overall checking for any reshoots needed before filming ends).

Preparations

Testing

Once I knew exactly what I would be undergoing and creating for my Director & Producer after each day of filming, the DOP and I discussed the viability of being able to complete these tasks with our camera footage. As we'd be shooting with a Blackmagic camera that produces extremely high quality footage that digitises into very large video files, it was possible that an issue could come up with attempting to edit such large files on a MacBook laptop (the only equipment that I would be able to edit the dailies on in order to edit either on location or locally and overnight), as this could cause the laptop to either run too slowly or freeze, stopping me from being able to edit.

So, we decided to test our Blackmagic camera footage in pre-production, by the DOP recording a number of clips on a recce day at the location, and giving the clips to me to test editing on my laptop. When testing I found that a small amount of clips took a long time to copy from one hard drive to another due to their size (although the resolution was slightly higher than the real shoot's footage would be), and that the clips made my editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, run slower and slower. As these clips totalled at 2 minutes, and our film would total at 15 minutes, it seemed likely that editing the dailies in their full high quality and size would not work.

I then decided that the best solution would be to make lower quality - and therefore lower file size - duplicates of the clips in order to edit the dailies on my laptop. With tips and guidance from our course technician, I found that the best way to do this was through Adobe Prelude, a software that allows you to simply make copies of footage and transcode them into lower quality files.

With further help from an Adobe Help page [5] and another useful online guide [6] describing the best ways to transcode high quality footage into low quality footage using Adobe Prelude alongside Adobe Media Encoder, I was able to downgrade the quality of all of the Blackmagic test clips. An example of their change is one 10 second clip went from 1.39GB in Apple ProRes 4444, to just 16.8MB in H.264, while still retaining the same frame sizing and 25 FPS (frames per second).

Screenshot example of transcoding the test clips in Adobe Prelude before them being put through Adobe Media Encoder

Although it was evident that using Prelude for my real dailies would take a very long time as the software took a long time to convert a small amount of clips, I was then able to edit the low quality footage very smoothly and easily in Premiere. Meaning that the problem was solved, and that I would be using Prelude to make low quality copies of all footage from each day in order to create dailies for Double Exposure.

Below is the Dailies Test Result Video exported in H.264:

Vimeo Link

Password: TVP

Set-Up & Workflow Research

Before beginning dailies, I wanted to find out the best ways to set-up and organise my workload such as folder organisation and file naming, as this would help me to make the footage and sound recordings easy to navigate and locate, and help me both now and in post-production to identify each clip by well described names. As editing the dailies of the film are the first step in editing the whole production, it was very helpful to learn the best ways to handle the steps of editing and keep everything organised.

In an extract from Elliot Grove's Raindance Lo-To-No Budget Filmmaking book, he states that the first stage of editing is 'Logging', which is explained as...

"The dailies or rushes are sorted and labelled in ‘bins’. Each take can contain extra notes from the director or the cinematographer. This is the first time the editor sees the film, and since it is shot out of sequence, it is out of context of the story. A good editor views the rushes and looks for fluidity of movement and nuances that will later be incorporated into the film." [7]

- This advice and guidance on the first step of editing allowed me to consider what system I wanted to use for organising bins/folders that contain each day's sound and footage, alongside sparking the idea to create my own daily notes on the scenes and the ways that they cut together.

Another article provided tips the best ways to organise scenes and each day's footage...

• "Organize the dailies according to script order, so that Scene 11 always comes after Scene 10, no matter what the shooting order was.
• Arrange the dailies in the order in which the film was shot, which helps the director remember the day better.
• Organize according to which camera the takes are from (when multiple cameras are used). For example, the director might like to see all the shots from Camera A then Camera B for the same setup. So 10A-1 "A" is followed by 10A-2 "A" and 10A-3 "A," then 10A-1 "B" and so on. Or, the director might like to organize it so 10A-1 "A" is immediately followed by 10A-1 "B." [8]

- The first bullet point helped me to make the decision of creating the dailies and presenting them in script order, as to follow the story properly. The second allowed me to consider separating each day's scenes and footage properly as to clarify exactly what scenes where shot on which day, and the last point started my decision making for the types of names I wanted to use for each video file.

Another source of information came from an article that explains effective ways to organise your edit from the start...

The website's image below shows an Editor's folder/bin labelling and organisation before beginning editing or logging [9]

- This guide and image helped me to decide on using a very similar layout for my dailies' folders and labelling, for example using 'Audio', 'Video Footage', 'Day-01' etc.

The final source of information helped me with extra workflow tips and clip naming ideas:

"Always hyphenate file names to separate words instead of using underscores.  Aside from being easy to look at, file names with hyphens are more web friendly (search engines can parse out the words).  For instance a good looking filename would be “project-name-client-name-v6.mov” [10]

- Although the name example differs, with a combination of my research on file and bin naming before beginning editing dailies, I decided on a naming system of beginning with the subject in shot, any movements, shot size, and ending with a lowercase letter to represent which take of the shot it is. For example a shot in scene 1 could be 'EMILY-CAR-EXTERIOR-TRACKING-MCU-a', or in scene 3 'WINE-BOTTLE-CU-a'. I feel that this is a personalised but professional, and effective way for me and anyone else to identify the clips, and it combines well with my naming systems for folders/bins.

I feel that the research that I conducted on dailies, preparations for my work, and the exact structure and organisational workflow that I want to use, were extremely helpful before beginning the editing process in the production phase of the film. Without this research, the organisation of the sound and footage may not have been well structured, also meaning that it would be unstructured for post-production, and it may have slowed down my work process. But with this research, I was able to fully understand my task at hand, undergo tests and preparations in pre-production, and decide on my own personal approach to dailies.

References

1. Dailies Explained
2. Rushes Explained
3. DAILIES AND RUSHES
4. Film Terms Glossary: Dailies
5. How to ingest media clips with Adobe Prelude
6. The Adobe Prelude Workflow (Part Two): Ingest and Logging
7. THE 6 STAGES OF EDITING AS A FILM DIRECTOR
8. Organizing Materials
9. Nine Steps to Organized Video Editing – Documentary & Fiction Film
10. File Naming for Video Editors, Designers & Photographers