Run a DIT workflow

What this is about

Between the camera and the edit sits a chain of unglamorous decisions: how folders are structured, which copy counts as master, whether the editor receives camera originals or proxies, who tells the DP that clip 47 has a corrupt frame. When no one designs this chain, it designs itself at 10 p.m. in a hotel room, differently every day. A DIT workflow is simply the chain designed once, in prep, and executed identically every shoot day — which is why post can start cutting the morning after the last day instead of spending a week sorting.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The folder schema is decided in prep and never improvised: day, camera, card — the same skeleton every single day
• Proxies are only useful when they carry the exact names of their originals; a renamed proxy is a trap
• Technical feedback flows back to camera the same day — a corrupt clip discovered in post is a reshoot, discovered at lunch it is a retake
• The daily media report is one screen: cards offloaded, checksums green, issues found, storage remaining

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Design the pipeline in prep, end to end: camera settings and codecs, offload tool, folder schema, proxy specs if the edit wants them, and the drive that will physically reach post.
2. Build a real offload station on set — table, power, reader, both target drives, checksum software — instead of balancing a laptop on a flight case near the exit.
3. Offload every card into the fixed schema with verification, and record the result. The schema is sacred: one creative subfolder invented on day two costs an hour on day ten.
4. Skim each card after copying: play the first and last clip, spot-check the middle, confirm the count matches the camera. Full QC is not the goal; catching a dead card is.
5. Report technical findings to the DP the same day — corrupt frames, focus misses visible at full size, flicker. The set can fix today what post can only mourn.
6. Generate proxies overnight if the edit runs on them, with identical filenames and a documented LUT, so the online relink at the end is a click and not an archaeology project.
7. Close each day with the media report to production: what was shot, where it lives, what hurts. Storage running low surfaces here, two days before it becomes an emergency.
8. Hand post one drive with the complete, schema-true structure and the reports beside the media — and get a written confirmation that it arrived and opens.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Folder structures invented nightly, so no two days of the shoot match
• Proxies with helpful new names that no longer point at their originals
• Nobody watching the material until post, when every discovery is expensive

With TillyGen

Export the TillyGen shot list as CSV and the DIT checklist inherits the day's structure — scenes, shots and planned cards line up, and the API can feed the same data straight into reporting tools if your pipeline goes that far.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.