The Camera Prep Checklist: 7 Steps to a Shoot-Ready Package (Free App Included)

A proper camera prep checklist covers five jobs: build the kit list before you arrive, check every item in against that list, run the standard checks on every body and every lens, work out how many cards and batteries the shoot actually needs, and record anything missing, damaged or failed so nobody discovers it at 6am on day one. Do those five things in order and prep day stops being a memory game. This guide walks through the full checklist in 7 steps, and every step can be run in SmartPrep, our free prep sheet app, so you walk out of the rental house with a finished, sendable document instead of a notes app full of fragments.

In this article

• What is a camera prep day and why does it matter?
• Step 1: Build the kit list before the rental house
• Step 2: Check everything in, line by line
• Step 3: Run the prep checks on every body and lens
• Step 4: Work out cards and batteries with real numbers
• Step 5: Flag what is missing, damaged or substituted
• Step 6: Export the prep sheet and send it
• Step 7: Hand the job to the shoot day, and to wrap
• Paper checklist vs a prep sheet app
• FAQ

What is a camera prep day and why does it matter?

Camera prep is the day (or one to three days on a bigger job) the camera department spends at the rental house before the shoot, building and testing every piece of the package while problems can still be fixed for free. As 1st ACs like Joshua Cote have described, a thorough prep is the difference between a smooth first morning and a package problem discovered with forty people standing around. Shoot days are expensive and chaotic. Prep day is cheap and quiet. Everything you catch on prep day is a problem that never happens.

The failure mode is almost never laziness. It is that most prep still runs on memory, a clipboard, and photos in a group chat. The checklist below replaces that with a structure you can hand to someone else.

Step 1: How do you build the kit list before the rental house?

Never walk into a rental house without a written list of what was ordered. The booking email is not a list. Turn it into one: every body with its serial, every lens, every filter, every card, every battery, one line each with a quantity. A typical two camera job runs to 40 or 50 lines, which is exactly why nobody holds it in their head.

The fastest way to get there is to stop typing and import the order the rental house already sent you. SmartPrep takes it four ways: paste the equipment list straight out of the email, open the quote or invoice PDF, open a spreadsheet export, or photograph the printed order taped to the cart.

It reads the paperwork as a table, not as a wall of words, so quantities come from the quantity column and serial numbers come from the serial column instead of being guessed at. It sorts every line into the right category, expands a lens set into one line per focal, skips the delivery and insurance rows that are not gear, reads the letterhead for the rental house name and the collection and return dates, and offers to configure the camera package it found. Everything lands on a review screen first, so nothing is added until you have looked at it. It reads Spanish paperwork too, with the same column logic applied to a factura.

If you would rather build by hand, there are still five job templates (single camera commercial, two camera drama, doc kit, gimbal package, studio interview), your own saved gear library, and a searchable database of bodies, lenses, filters, media, power and support.

Step 2: How do you check gear in, line by line?

Check-in is a one-hand job done standing in a corridor, so keep the mechanics simple: as each case opens, mark its line received. Anything that is not simply received gets its real state instead: missing, damaged, substituted, or still to pull. Short deliveries count too. If you ordered four cards and two arrived, that is a flag, not a footnote.

In SmartPrep a tap cycles the state and a long press opens the line to add a condition note. The screen stays awake while you work through the trolley, and a search box across the top filters the list by anything the row shows: a name, a serial, a make, a rental house. On a 45 line package that is the difference between finding the matte box and scrolling for it.

Two things worth doing properly at this stage:

• Track what is inside each line, not just the line. A lens set is not one serial. A monitor kit is not one item. Each lens, arm, cable and spare motor can be listed inside its line with its own serial and its own damage record, and ticked off individually. A set expands into its focals in one tap.
• Scan the serial rather than typing it. There is a camera button beside every serial field. Photograph the plate or its barcode and tap the right reading from the candidates it offers. It never fills the field silently, because a wrong serial is worse than a blank one.

If the same serial turns up on two lines, the row quietly flags it. That is usually a double entry, and occasionally it is the rental house sending you one item twice on paper.

Step 3: What prep checks should you run on every body and lens?

The standard set, per camera body: power and boot, sensor check, mount check, timecode jam and drift over an hour, firmware version, media formatting in the camera it will live in, and a record test with the actual codec and frame rate of the job. Per lens: back focus on a chart, focus scale accuracy at the marks, hard stops, filter thread condition, and a wide-open look at the elements in hard light.

The trap is scale. A lens set is not one line of prep, it is one round of checks per focal. A two camera drama package expands to roughly 190 individual checks, which is why SmartPrep generates the rounds for you, one per body and one per focal in the kit, and records pass or fail on each. A recorded fail never quietly disappears from the sheet, even if the item it belongs to leaves the kit list later.

Step 4: How many cards and batteries do you actually need?

Guessing is how someone runs out of cards mid-afternoon. The honest way to plan media is from the camera's real data rate at your resolution, codec and frame rate.

SmartPrep's calculator covers every body in its 166 camera database. For a growing set of bodies the data rates were read straight off manufacturer spec sheets and official record-time tables, the source is quoted under every answer, and the engine is checked against 75 published figures before a build ships. For any other body you type the data rate the camera itself reports on its own media screen, in either Mb/s or MB/s (the unit matters: manufacturers do not agree on which one to publish), and everything downstream is computed from that and clearly labelled as approximate. It will also warn you when a card cannot sustain the codec you have chosen.

The power side is a real department now, not an afterthought. Over 40 named battery packs are on file alongside the nominal classes, with power stations as their own category, and the body power draw of more than 25 cameras. The picker only offers packs that actually fit the body you selected, so a Canon plate never appears on a RED, and it will tell you when a pack cannot deliver the wattage your build is drawing and will cut out under load.

Step 5: How do you flag what is missing, damaged or substituted?

The most valuable part of a prep sheet is not the long list of things that arrived. It is the short list of things that did not. Everything missing, damaged, substituted or short delivered, plus every failed check, belongs in one red block the rental house and the production office cannot miss on a skim. That block is your protection: it proves what was known, when, and by whom, before the truck left.

Photograph the damage while you are looking at it. Words are what get argued about at the returns counter six weeks later. Any line can carry photographs of what is wrong with it, and so can each individual lens or accessory listed inside it. The files are named after the item they belong to, so a frame arrives in someone's inbox as TLS_CANON_K35_32MM_DAMAGE_1.JPG rather than IMG_4471, and they print on their own pages at the end of the prep sheet PDF. Existing damage at pickup is recorded separately from new damage, which is the distinction the whole conversation turns on.

Two more things this step covers that paper handles badly:

• Gear from several rental houses on one job. Each line records where it came from, the kit list and the prep sheet can group by house, and you can export a separate sheet per house so the grip company is not sent four pages of camera package.
• Both signatures, at the counter, on the phone. The camera department signs and the rental house signs, each with a printed name and a date, and the ink prints on the sheet. A signature with no name is half a record, so the app will not save one without it.

Step 6: Export the prep sheet and send it before you leave

Finish prep by producing the document while you are still standing in the building: what was ordered, what arrived, what state every line is in, what failed, the damage photographs, and the flags block up front. Send it to the rental house contact and the production office the same day. In SmartPrep that is one tap: a PDF named after your production and date, plus CSV for spreadsheets and a full JSON backup if you want them.

If your crew works in Spanish, the whole app follows, and so does the printed sheet. The language is picked in Settings or taken from the device, and the PDF prints in the language the people reading it actually use.

Step 7: How does prep day hand off to the shoot day, and to wrap?

Prep ends with a configured shoot. Camera letters, bodies, formats, codecs, the lens set and the filter kit are all decisions you already made, so they should not be typed twice. SmartPrep writes a handoff file that SmartLog, our free camera report app, imports in one step. You walk on set the next morning and the first take is ready to log.

The same job goes forward again at the end. SmartWrap takes the prep job and turns it into a returns list, at the quantities you actually received rather than the quantities that were ordered, carrying the serials, the contents, the condition notes and the damage photographs with it. Anything that never arrived is listed as not expected back, so nobody spends wrap night hunting for a lens that was never delivered. All three tools are free, and none of them asks for an account.

Is a prep sheet app better than a paper checklist?

Paper works until something changes. Here is the honest comparison:

On prep day you need to...	Paper / notes app	Prep sheet app
Build the kit list	Retype the booking email	Import the order (paste, PDF, spreadsheet, photo), or templates, library, database
Track states per line	Ticks and margin notes	Received / missing / damaged / substituted, with notes
Record each lens in a set	One line for the whole set	Own serial and own damage record per lens
Prove the condition	A description, and photos in a group chat	Photos attached to the line, named after the item, printed on the sheet
Plan cards and batteries	Guess, or a separate calculator	Built in, sources quoted
Surface the problems	Buried in the pages	One red flags block
Send the record	Photograph the pages	Named PDF, one tap, signed by both sides
Configure the shoot day	Retype it all again	One-step handoff to SmartLog, then to SmartWrap

Frequently asked questions

How long does camera prep take?

One day for a straightforward single camera package, and commonly two or three days for multi camera drama or anything with a big lens list, specialty rigs or extensive testing. Book more time than you think you need. Prep time is cheap compared to a lost shoot morning.

What should be on a camera prep checklist?

Five things: the complete kit list with quantities, a received state for every line, the standard checks per body (power, sensor, mount, timecode, firmware, record test) and per lens (back focus, scale accuracy, hard stops, threads), a cards and batteries plan based on real data rates, and a flags section for everything missing, damaged, substituted or failed.

How good does the photo of the rental order have to be?

Good enough that you could read it yourself. It is built for a hand-held shot at the counter, so a page photographed at an angle, folded, unevenly lit or a little soft still reads. The tilt is measured and removed before the rows are grouped, and the columns are found from the layout of the page rather than guessed from the words. The reading happens on your device, and the picture is not uploaded anywhere.

How many cards and batteries do I need for a shoot?

Work it out from the camera's data rate at your actual resolution, codec and frame rate, times your expected recording hours, times your cameras, plus a safety margin. Manufacturer spec sheets and record time tables give real figures; the camera's own media screen gives you the rate for anything unusual. SmartPrep does this arithmetic for you and shows the source of every number it uses.

Where do the damage photos go?

Onto your device, and nowhere else. A photo you attach to a line is stored in the browser's own database on that phone or tablet. It is never uploaded, never sent anywhere and never seen by us. It travels only when you export the job yourself or hand it to SmartWrap.

Do I need internet at the rental house?

Rental house basements are famous dead zones, so your prep tools should not depend on a connection. SmartPrep works fully offline after the first load, including the import, the calculator and the PDF export, and stores everything on your own device with no account.