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Rivas – A type of tape splicer which uses perforated splicing tape. Two models exist: One for straight cuts used for picture, and one for slanted cuts used for sound.
Room Tone – A recording of the “silence” of a room or any location, to be used to fill in gaps when editing the sound. The silence of a location is really not very silent at all, and the room tone of one location is not a substitute for another, so a sync sound shoot will usually end with the sound recordist asking everyone to be quiet for the recording of 30 seconds of room tone.
Rough Cut – The edited film, between the stages of being an assembly and a fine cut.
Rushes – The workprint, when it is just back from the lab, unedited, called the rushes because of the rush to see that everything came out alright. Also known as Dailies, in honor of the minority of labs that will have it later that day.
Another term for Academy Leader.
A cloth bag with two chambers filled with sand, used as a weight on the legs of a light stand for additional stability.
A scene is really just a single shot. But often scene is used to mean several shots, which is more to do with the word’s origin in theater. It is sometimes clearer to say “sequence” for several shots, so as not to confuse the filmic and theatrical meanings of the word.
Damage to a film in the form of a long gouge of either the emulsion or the base. A scratch on the emulsion is pretty much unfixable, since part of the image itself is missing. A scratch on the base can be alleviated with Wet Gate printing. Scratches on your workprint don’t really matter at all, since you will go back to the pristine camera original for your final print.
A mix with little correction of the sound, that is usually done before the final mix in order to screen the film with all the sounds in place, to determine if there are any changes to be made. Typically this is not done on lower budget productions, as the added cost would be self-defeating.
A scratch test is done before shooting, by running either a foot or two of the beginning of a roll of film, or a dummy roll of film, and checking for scratches, to insure that neither the camera nor the magazines are scratching the film.
A sync recording made under conditions that make the sound useless, except for reference to the sound editor or to the actors for dubbing.
Sometimes it is useful to separate out all the shots you are going to use before beginning to edit. These are known as selects.
A permanent felt-tipped marker useful for labeling the cans of exposed rolls out on a shoot and in the editing room for labeling your leader. Sharpie is a brand-name of the most common of these markers.
The ratio of how much film shot compared to running time of the finished film. For instance a 5 minute film for which you shot 30 minutes of footage would have a shooting ratio of 6 to 1.
The unexposed remainder of a roll of film in a magazine that is clipped and placed back into a can for use later. Unlike recans a shotend is something less than 400 feet.
