Camera clip numbers
Camera rolled without a log: what happens to the clip numbers?
Nothing happens to the file the camera already wrote. A camera's clip counter advances on every recording it makes, logged or not, because the card holds a file either way. When you catch up and log that take after the fact, the number stays spent and belongs to that unlogged take. The gap in your numbering is real, not a mistake, and a shot log that respects it will show the same gap the card shows.
The moment this usually happens
Second AC steps away for a mag change. The DP wants a quick test roll to check exposure while the room resets. Someone hits record to grab a room tone. None of these are logging failures exactly, they are five seconds where nobody with a phone or a clipboard was watching the camera, and the camera does not care. It wrote a file. Its counter moved on to the next number whether that file has a line in anyone's log or not.
Why you cannot just renumber to close the gap
The instinct is to treat the gap as a mistake to fix: clip 46, clip 47, then the log jumps to clip 49, so shift everything down two and call it clean. That is wrong, because the camera is not counting your log entries. It is counting files it physically wrote to the card. Clip 48 exists whether or not anyone logged it, and renumbering the log to pretend it does not disconnects the log from the card it is supposed to describe.
A shot log's whole value at wrap is that it matches the card. The moment it stops matching to make the numbers look tidier, it stops being trustworthy for the one thing an editor actually needs it for: knowing what physically exists.
Catching it up after the fact
The fix is not closing the gap, it is filling it. Log the take against the clip number the card already used, even if that log entry is written twenty minutes late or at lunch. This is also where the distinction between a bad take and a take that never happened matters: if the camera wrote a file, mark it discarded, not deleted. Discarding keeps the number spent and shows the take existed and was rejected. Deleting hands the number back, which is only correct when the camera genuinely never wrote anything for it, not when it wrote something nobody wanted.
The rule that keeps this simple: if there is a file on the card for it, discard it. If the card has nothing, delete it. The card is the source of truth, not the memory of who was standing where.
What this means for the editor
Gaps in clip numbers are normal, not corruption. An editor who sees clip 0047 missing between 46 and 49 and assumes a file went missing from the card has a reasonable first instinct and the wrong conclusion, if the shot log already notes that the camera rolled untracked in that window. The fix on the editorial side is not to go hunting for a lost file. It is to check whether the gap is already explained in the log before treating it as a problem.
Numbers that match the card
Log late, not wrong
Clapper's clip counter moves with the camera, not with when you got around to logging it. Catch a take up after the fact and the number lines up with what the card actually has.
Open Clapper →