Assistant editor's master record—take numbers, durations, codec, bad frames, timing notes. Built during ingest, essential for editorial workflow.
While the raw transfer is running — and the assistant is sitting in front of the monitors — a document is created in parallel that will later make every cut a hell if it's missing: the Daily Editor Log. It's not glamorous. It's not creative. But it's the difference between an editing station where one works productively and a chaos of unmarked sequences and lost takes.
The essence: While every camera is rolling, the assistant — or the assistant, usually she — logs every take with number, length, TC timecode in and out, critical notes on quality defects, audio problems, motion blur, faulty lens settings. In addition, there are notes on encoding: RAW or ProRes, bit depth, color space. Also scene numbers, camera setup identifiers, ISO, and shutter angle — everything in the log. Why? Because three weeks later, the editor no longer knows which of the 47 takes of scene 23 actually had the sharp close-up or which is affected by flicker artifacts.
In practice, this means: The log becomes the basis of the proxy workflow. The editor doesn't blindly open dozens of raw camera files — they look at the log, immediately see marked that take 5 turned out too dark or that only take 12 had the correct focus pull. Assistants also note director feedback from the set: "This one is the one" or "Print it" — markers that are worth their weight in gold in the edit. With colored logs (green for gold take, red for trash), the editor works intuitively faster.
The format varies by pipeline: Some houses maintain Excel sheets, others use specialized software like Pomfort Livegrade, AirSpeed, or proprietary database systems. Regardless of the tool, the log must be machine-readable. It feeds directly into the EDL, the proxy name, the color grading workflow. A incorrectly entered timecode length will carry through all downstream processes — color matching becomes impossible if the frame counts are not correct.
Newcomers often underestimate the time required: A day with four cameras at 20 takes each of 2–4 minutes means 320–640 lines of data. This is not a seconds-long task — it requires concentration, accuracy, zero tolerance for error. The difference between an assistant editor who leaves a complete log and one who works sloppily is, at the end of the production time, the difference between on-time delivery and delays in the edit.