First rough cut of previous day's footage reviewed by director and cinematographer each morning to check quality and avoid costly reshoots.
Technical Details
Traditional film dailies are created by overnight processing of the 35mm negative with standard lighting and no color correction. In digital productions, dailies are generated as compressed files with a resolution of 1920×1080 or 2048×1080 at 24fps. The workflow includes applying a LUT (Look-Up Table) and burning in keycode, timecode, camera data, and scene numbers. Modern Digital Intermediate Labs deliver dailies with a data rate of 100-185 Mbit/s, while low-resolution proxies for editing only reach 15-25 Mbit/s.
History & Development
The dailies system became established in the 1930s with the introduction of standardized laboratory processes in Hollywood. Kodak developed the first automated printer for dailies production in 1952. The transition to digital dailies began in 2005 with the introduction of Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes codecs. Since 2015, 85% of all Hollywood productions have relied on purely digital dailies workflows with cloud-based distribution.
Practical Application in Film
For "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015), 15 hours of raw footage were compressed daily into 90 minutes of dailies and transmitted to five locations worldwide. Stanley Kubrick notoriously reviewed up to 60 takes per setup in the dailies before approving a scene for "The Shining." The standard workflow involves transmitting dailies by 10 AM, allowing the director and editor to assess quality and organize any reshoots on the same day.
Comparison & Alternatives
Dailies differ from rushes through their technical preparation with metadata and color correction. Live monitoring on set via director's viewfinders replaces immediate quality control but not the detailed review of all footage. Modern near-live systems like Pomfort LiveGrade transmit color-corrected previews during shooting, but do not reduce the need for final dailies review for editing approval.