Reconciling two logs
The camera report and the script supervisor's log disagree. Now what?
Trust the camera report for what the card physically has, and the script supervisor's log for what happened during the take. They disagree because they are kept by two different people watching two different things, and a mismatch almost always means one of them missed a mid-take stop, a re-slate, or a take that never got called out loud. Reconcile by clip number, not by take number. The card's physical clip count cannot lie about how many files exist.
Pull both logs side by side
Sort each by camera unit if the shoot was multi-camera. Comparing across units at the same time is where false mismatches come from.
Count against the camera report's own tally
The card's physical clip count cannot lie about how many files exist. Use it as the reference point, not the take count from the continuity log.
Find the first gap where the two disagree
Work forward chronologically. The first point of disagreement is almost always where the actual drift started; everything after it is a symptom, not a separate cause.
Check the two usual causes
A take rolled without being logged, or a take was re-slated mid-roll and recorded under the old number in one log but the new one in the other.
Fix forward, not backward
Note the correction at the point you found it. Do not renumber everything before it just to make the sequence look tidy; that disconnects the log from what the card actually has.
Why the two logs are not the same document
The camera report is a mechanical record of what a card physically holds: reel, clip range, format, sound roll if applicable. It is filled out by whoever loaded that card, usually the camera department. The script supervisor's log is a creative and continuity record of what happened during each take: which lines were said, what was circled, what broke continuity from the last take. Different people, different vantage points, different moments of the day. Expecting them to always match by construction is expecting two independent observers never to miss anything, which is not realistic across a full shoot day.
The two usual causes, in practice: a take the camera rolled but nobody called out loud, so it never made the continuity log at all; or a take that got re-slated mid-roll, where the camera department logged the original slate and the script supervisor logged the corrected one.
What a shot log can prevent, and what it cannot fix
A phone-first log that stamps a timecode on every tap and advances camera clip numbers automatically closes one whole category of this problem: it cannot forget to log a take, because the take number and the clip number are the same record, made by the same tap, at the same moment. What it cannot fix is a disagreement between two genuinely independent paper trails from a production that used both a camera department report and a separate script supervisor log. For that, the reconciliation above is still the right process, done once at wrap rather than guessed at during the edit.
One record, not two to reconcile
Take number and clip number, made by the same tap
Clapper's counter advances with the camera automatically, so the log and the card stay in step without a separate camera report to cross-check against.
Open Clapper →