Dailies

In filmmaking, dailies or rushes are the raw, unedited footage shot during the making of a motion picture.

[1] The term was also used to describe film dailies as "the first positive prints made by the laboratory from the negative photographed on the previous day".

Some filmmakers may choose to distribute dailies via a storage medium such as DVDs or USB sticks for security reasons.

Individual copies may be uniquely coded or serialized to help discourage and prosecute unauthorized leaks of the material.

Viewing dailies allows the film crew to see exactly what images and audio were captured with the takes, to detect technical problems such as a dirty lens, focus issues, exposure, etc.

It also presents an opportunity for the director to evaluate the actor's performances and to confirm having captured a scene from an adequate assortment of camera angles.

The ability to implement timely reshoots also helps mitigate continuity issues such as weather changes in exterior shots.

However, because of the costs involved and depending on the target quality of the film, some productions viewed dailies on DVD.

[6] In the production of low-budget films with few crew and a short and uninterrupted shooting period, review of the takes may be very quick and a formal, regular group viewing of dailies may be forgone.

Then the technician looks for the frame where the clapper first closes and for the beep or clapping sound on the audiotape, adjusting one or the other until they happen simultaneously when played back.

Systems exist which record synchronized timecode onto the film and audiotape at the time of shooting, allowing for automatic alignment of picture and audio.

When using a video camera or digital motion picture camera, the image and sound are often recorded simultaneously to video tape or hard disk in a format that can be immediately viewed on a monitor, eliminating the need to undergo a conversion process to create dailies for viewing.

Outside of their use in producing a motion picture, dailies are desirable by fans as a collector's item and to see more of the filmmaking process.

In most other English-speaking countries, the actors' unions have similar contracts which limit the distribution of all film dailies.