When shooting in 16mm, it is standard procedure to print every take, when shooting in 35mm, in order to avoid the expense of printing unwanted takes, the laboratory will print selectively. At the end of each take, the director will decide whether or not the take is worth printing. The takes that he selects will be circled on the script supervisor’s copy of the screenplay, on the camera reports, and on the sound reports. Selected takes are also referred to as “circled takes”.

    At the end of each day a production assistant will run the exposed film and a copy of the camera reports to the laboratory, and the one-quarter inch tapes and a copy of the sound reports, to the sound house. During the night, the lab will process the film and make a positive print, called a “daily”, of the director’s selected takes, the sound house will transfer the one-quarter inch tape from the same selected takes onto a sprocket magnetic track. This is called a “sound daily”. The stock used for a 16mm magnetic track is completely coated with magnetic oxide, 35mm magnetic stock for sound dailies is coated with two stripes of oxide and is referred to as “edit stripe”. The sound from the original one-quarter inch recording will be transferred onto the wider of the two stripes. The narrow stripe is called a “balance stripe” since its purpose is to balance the thickness of the stock at both edges. If one edge were thicker than the other, the stock would have a tendency to “cone” as its being wound onto a core or reel.

    The following day, while the production team shoots the next series of scenes, an assistant editor will sync the dailies, lining up the sound track with the picture for an interlock screening that same evening. The picture and sound track are placed in sync by lining up the picture and sound of the clap stick at the beginning of each take. A sync signal system on the camera and tape recorder will ensure that they both run at the same speed. Consequently, when the picture and sound of the clap stick are in sync at the head of a take, the rest of the take will be in sync as well. After checking to make certain that each scene is in sync, the assistant editor will send the picture and sound track to be coded. Coding is the process of printing numbers (code numbers) on the edge of the picture at one-foot intervals and identical numbers will be used as a sync reference when the editor begins cutting the picture and tracks.

    In addition to syncing the dailies, the assistant editor will log each take, listing the scene and take number, the code numbers at the beginning and end of each take, the print-through edge numbers at the beginning and end of each take, and a brief description of each take.

    If you are shooting in close proximity to your lab and sound house, each day’s shooting will be synced and ready for an interlock screening the following evening. The first day’s dailies will be screened on the second night of production and a new set of dailies will be ready for screening every night thereafter.

    Deviations in this schedule occur when the production goes on distant location or switches to a night-time shooting schedule, or when the laboratory has difficulties, such as a printer breakdown. If you’re shooting on distant locations it will take time to ship material to and from the lab. A lab technician will give you technical reports each morning by phone, which aids the director of photography but doesn’t tell the director anything about the performances. Often a producer will not go to the location but will stay behind and screen dailies. This can be of great value to the director. In any case, the dailies will be sent as quickly as possible to wherever the production is shooting.

    Some low-budget pictures are scheduled so tightly as to make daily screenings impossible. At the very least, however, dailies may be viewed on weekends or on the first available rest day.

    The value of screening dailies cannot be overstated. For the director it is an opportunity to determine how the actors’ performances and character interpretations translate to the screen. He will judge the accuracy of his communication with the director of photography and the camera operator, with the sound mixer, the makeup artist, and so forth. He will get a clear, overall feeling for how his picture is coming together.

    For the crew, dailies offer an opportunity to evaluate their specific areas of responsibility. The director of photography and gaffer will judge their approach to lighting. The sound mixer will judge not only his original recordings, but also the quality of the transfers. The makeup artist will improve his approach to certain actors’ makeup based on information he gets from the dailies. The script supervisor will double-check continuity within each scene. In short, everyone stands to learn from the dailies and improve his work on the film.

    In addition, dailies are a terrific morale booster. Film almost always looks good in daily form, sometimes deceptively so. Francis Ford Coppola once said, “A finished film never looks as good as the dailies”. The daily screenings are a time and gratifying to sit in a screening room and watch the previous day’s work. It’s usually verification that everyone has done a good job.

    The same is often true of the actors, but there is a difference. Actors are not sitting back objectively watching their work, they are watching themselves. For some actors this is constructive but for others it is devastating. Should they not like their performance in a particular scene, or their interpretation of a character, they may suddenly change that character partway through the film. It may be that a scene out of context and unedited will strike a wrong note with an actor. Their trust in the director may decline. They may become timid and less willing to take chances. That same scene in the context of the finished film, completely edited, may work magnificently but it is often difficult for an actor to judge a scene out of context. In a sense, it requires reading the director’s mind. For this reason many directors request that the cast not be permitted to attend dailies screenings. This is often sound policy and not necessarily a reflection on the director’s sense of security about his work.

    Another advantage to daily screenings is that if a scene doesn’t work it can usually be reshot with minimum effort. Even if you’ve moved to a different location, you may be able to rewrite the scene to fit the new location. The sooner you know you’ve got a problem, the more flexibility you will have in solving it.

    In addition to the cast and production crew, the film editor will usually attend daily screenings.