What to say out loud while you film

You film for three hours. Six weeks later you, or somebody you pay, opens a folder of files named by the camera and starts scrubbing through them looking for the part where you explained the second stage. It takes an hour to find twelve minutes of usable material, and none of that hour improved the video.

Before each section, say where you are while the camera is running. Spoken markers travel with the recording; a shared shot log or notes can add detail alongside them.

Who are you talking to?

The person who will review and edit the footage.

That is the part worth holding on to, because it changes what feels reasonable to say. Whether it is an editor you have hired or you in three weeks with no memory of the day, one person is going to sit with all of it, in order, at their desk. Everything you know while filming, which take was the good one, which section you abandoned, what you meant to come back to, exists only in your head, and your head does not get offloaded from the card.

Speak to that person. They cannot hear you now, but they will.

What do you say before each section?

Where you are in the process, in the plainest words you have.

Right, base is done, now the sauce.This is the section about tuning.Second half of the lesson, hands only. No viewer is going to hear these. They are cut out along with the pauses and the throat clearing, and they exist purely so the footage stops being an undifferentiated three hours.

A cooking partner was asked to say the stage of the recipe out loud while filming, for exactly this reason. Hours of footage turned into something that could be scanned rather than watched. It saved editing time, and the whole cost was remembering to speak.

Spoken landmarks help an editor scan the waveform or search a transcript. Logs, timecodes and image previews can help too; the aim is to make the useful material easy to find.

When a take falls apart

That was a mess, going again.

Say it immediately, without apologising and without explaining what went wrong, then reset and go. The words themselves do not matter as long as they are the same words every time. What matters is that the take is now marked as dead in the one place a mark survives, which is the recording itself.

Without that, every take is a candidate. The person editing has to watch all of them to the end, including the four where you fluffed the same line, because there is nothing telling them not to.

The reverse is worth as much. When you finish a take and know it is the one, say so. That was the one. It saves somebody comparing five versions of a sentence you already had an opinion about.

What is the clap for?

Lining up two files that started at different moments.

If your sound is recorded on a separate device, a phone or a small recorder rather than into the camera, you end up with a picture file and a sound file that began whenever each machine was switched on. Somebody has to line them up, and a second out is enough to make you look like a badly dubbed film.

One clap, hands high enough that the camera can see them, gives both files the same landmark: a single bright frame in the picture, and a single tall spike in the waveform, which is the drawing of the sound you see along the bottom of an editing timeline. Line up the spike with the frame and the two recordings start together. On a long take, add a second clap at the end: if the spikes still line up nothing drifted, and if they have crept apart the two devices ran at slightly different rates and the later part needs nudging back. The clap fixes the start, not the drift.

Software does this automatically most of the time. The clap is for the shoot where it does not, which is usually the noisy one, and it takes half a second.

Do take numbers help?

Whenever a take number helps you identify the version later.

If you are filming a piece to camera over and over until you get it, count them out loud. Hook, take four. It gives you and whoever edits it a shared way of referring to a specific take, which matters when the note you want to send is use the fourth one rather than use the one where I sounded a bit warmer.

Keep the marking simple enough to use consistently. One clear take number is useful if it lets you and the editor refer to the same recording without guesswork.

If nothing is said

The editing time gets spent either way. That is the shape of it.

Unmarked footage creates avoidable searching, even when transcripts and previews help. A few spoken landmarks preserve what you already know about the session and make the handover easier.

What to say tomorrow

Write four phrases on a sticky note and put it under the lens. Where I am. That was a mess. That was the one. Take number.

You will feel ridiculous the first time, alone in a room, announcing the stage of a recipe to nobody. The person who edits it, including the version of you who has forgotten the entire day, is not going to find it ridiculous at all.

Sources and evidence

Our method. Saying where you are in the process before each section, marking a bad take out loud with the same words every time, and clapping once to line up sound recorded on a separate device, are this studio's working habits for footage that can be found again quickly, not formal requirements.