Sound report template

What this is about

Whoever edits the film was not there when the fridge hummed. The sound report substitutes for their presence: which microphone sat on which channel, which takes carry a plane, where the usable room tone lives, whether timecode stayed locked to camera. Its currency is honesty — a report that flags take three, lav rustle after the turn saves an afternoon of soloing tracks. Sample rate and timecode settings noted once per day prevent the sync drift that eats entire evenings in post.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The channel map per setup — boom on one, lav A on two, lav B on three — because unlabeled tracks turn the mix into archaeology
• Technical constants per day: sample rate at the production standard of 48 kHz, bit depth, timecode source and sync method
• Per take: scene, take, timecode, circled status and a problem note written plainly enough to act on
• Wild tracks and room tone logged with location and duration, since the edit cannot use what it cannot find

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Note recorder settings, sample rate and timecode sync once at day start, and again after every battery or card change.
2. Write the channel map when microphones go on, and update it the moment a lav moves to another person.
3. Log each take in the rhythm of the slate, marking circled takes and problems while everyone still remembers which noise it was.
4. Record room tone at every location and log it with a findable name — sixty seconds of silence, protected by the AD.
5. Capture wild tracks for sounds the scene needs — doors, steps, machines — and list them with their scene reference.
6. Hand the report over with the sound media and walk the editor through the day's flags in two minutes.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• An undocumented channel map, leaving post to guess which voice lives on track two
• Room tone skipped because the day ran late — the minute that would have hidden every cut
• Problems noted euphemistically, so slight rustle turns out to mean unusable

With TillyGen

TillyGen's schedule shows the sound department its day in advance — which scenes, which cast, which locations — so channel plans and wild-track lists exist before the first slate.

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.