Dailies

Dailies (also called rushes) are the lightly-processed daily output from the camera, prepared overnight (or close to it) and delivered to director, cinematographer, editor and production for review the day after a shoot. Historically printed from negative for screening, modern dailies are digital files generated from camera RAW or mezzanine masters with a basic creative LUT applied, color-balanced shot-to-shot, sometimes with audio sync and slate metadata embedded. Dailies serve multiple stakeholders simultaneously: the director and DoP review performance and image quality; the editor begins assembling a rough cut; the production accountant reconciles footage with the shooting schedule; the script supervisor verifies coverage. The DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) on set typically prepares the on-set look LUT during shooting and hands off camera files and CDL to the dailies operator (often working at a post house). Tools include Colorfront On-Set Dailies, Pomfort Silverstack, MTI Cortex, Codex Production Suite and Assimilate Live Looks. Modern dailies are usually distributed via secure web platforms like Frame.io, Aspera Faspex, Moxion or PIX System, often with watermarked H.264 or ProRes 422 Proxy versions. Quality matters because dailies establish the visual baseline for the rest of post — a flawed dailies workflow propagates color errors all the way to the final grade. Reference: ACES production setup documentation and Frame.io dailies workflow guides.