Log shots in a video

Before you cut a clip you usually watch it once and note where the good takes, the slate or the problem frames are. The Shot logger does this inside Reelcraft: you pause, mark the frame and write a note. The marks are saved with the video in your project.

1. Open the Shot logger

Select a video in the library and press Shot logger… in the inspector on the right — or choose Run → Shot logger…. The dialog opens with the selected video in Video; the list shows every video of the library.

No video yet? Press Add a video from your device… in the dialog. The file is added to the library like any other file and opens straight away.

The player uses your browser’s own video decoder. MP4 (H.264) and WebM play almost everywhere; formats such as ProRes or many MKV files do not. Convert them first with a recipe that uses the Universal Video Converter step.

2. Mark frames

Play the video and pause where a shot begins (in the player, the arrow keys step through the video). Press Mark current frame. Reelcraft

• stores the time to the millisecond,
• makes a thumbnail of the frame,
• adds the shot to Shots in time order and announces Shot 2 marked at 00:00:12.480.

A video can hold up to 200 shots; marking the same frame twice is refused.

3. Add notes and jump back

Each shot has a field Notes for shot 1, Notes for shot 2 … Type what you see — wide shot, mic visible, best take. Notes are saved while you type.

The button with the time, for example Go to 00:00:12.480, moves the player to that frame. Remove deletes the shot.

All changes are part of the project: autosave keeps them, the project file, share links and Google Drive contain them, and after closing the dialog Ctrl+Z undoes them. The inspector shows Logged shots with the number of marks.

Thumbnails are made in your browser from the video file and are not stored in the project. When you reopen the logger — or someone opens a shared project with the same file in their library — Reelcraft makes them again from the file.

4. Download the shot list

• Download shot list (HTML) saves a page with a numbered table: shot, thumbnail, time and notes. Open it in any browser and print it or save it as PDF. Labels follow the language of the workspace.
• Download CSV saves shot, time, seconds, note for a spreadsheet or an editing tool. Cells that start with =, +, - or @ are written as text, so they cannot run as formulas.

Where this fits

Use the times from the shot list as start and end values in the per-file sheet (see recipes and the sheet) to cut exactly those shots in a batch.

Next: subtitles, privacy and the report.