THE BETA IS OPEN. EVERYBODY'S INVITED.

shipped 30 August 2026

Beng Han took BL26 onto a job the same day it shipped and came back that evening. This is what a real day with it turned up. Requested by Beng Han, 2nd AC, Malaysia.

Scene, clip and take read in full on a phone. The fields the whole record is keyed on now take the width of the row, so a scene slated 175A/2, a clip of A012C003 and a take of 12PU are all readable instead of running out of the box.

Add a take after the one you are looking at. Open take 3, choose More for this take, and SmartLog offers you a take 4 already carrying take 3’s setup, and says how many are still missing on the way to the next one you logged. The take lands where it was shot, not at the end of the day.

Several cards in one report. The report page takes more than one roll now, the same way the log does. Pick A001, add A002, and the report on screen, the PDF and the marker files all cover exactly those cards and nothing else.

The flicker safe shutter angle, beside the frame rate. Set the frame rate and the angle that holds a whole cycle of the light is already on screen, for 50Hz or 60Hz mains, which is the question a DOP asks across the room. It is a starting point for a test rather than a promise, and the full flicker tool is still in the calculators for everything else.

The iris steps instead of dragging. A minus and a plus beside the stop, moving by the fraction you pick: a tenth, a quarter, a third, a half, two thirds or a whole stop. Three thirds lands exactly on the next stop, the way the marks on a barrel do.

In English and in Spanish. This is a beta build. It has not changed the public app, and it changes none of your takes, reports or exports.

shipped 22 August 2026

This is the largest single update SmartLog has ever had. Two things happen at once. Every free text field in the app now accepts and prints any written language, so a report typed in Thai, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Vietnamese, Greek or Russian comes out reading exactly as it was typed. And every feature that has been living on the beta since 20 August is now in the public app as well, so the beta and the public build are on par for the first time in weeks.

Type your report in your own language

SmartLog has always stored what you typed correctly. The printed camera report was the one place it could not carry it: the PDF writer used the standard document fonts, which only cover the Western European alphabet, so a Thai note arrived on the page as a row of question marks. It now renders any script your phone or computer can already display, using the device's own fonts, and it needs no download, no font pack and no internet connection to do it. Thai, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Vietnamese, Greek and Cyrillic have all been put through the real report and read back off the printed page.

Mixed lines work the way you would want them to. A note that reads Camera A followed by the same words in Thai stays in one line, in the right order, on the right baseline, in the right column. Long entries still shorten to fit their column exactly as they always did, circled takes still get their circle, a false take still gets its red line, and a tinted row still tints. Nothing about the shape of the report changed.

This came from Deejay Intouch, a DP who shoots Thai productions and wrote in to say that his descriptions were coming out as question marks. He was exactly right about the cause. Thank you for a report that was precise enough to fix in one pass.

The same text travels correctly everywhere else it already did: the CSV, the JSON backup, the on screen log, the HTML report, the editorial marker files and the handoff between devices. Your existing English and Spanish reports are unaffected, and that is measured rather than assumed: the printed English and Spanish camera reports come out byte for byte identical to the build before this one.

Official support for the 3DFilmParts Digital Slate

SmartLog can now talk to the 3DFilmParts Digital Slate directly. Turn it on under SETUP, in the slate board section, with the switch that says you own one. The app then finds the slate over its own wifi, reads what is on the board, pushes the production, the scene, the take and the roll to it, jams its timecode, and shows you what landed rather than assuming it worked. The slate keeps its own record of every take it witnessed, and nothing SmartLog does can overwrite that. The switch is off until you turn it on, so if you do not own one nothing about the app changes.

Everything that was beta is now public

The whole beta line went to the public app in the same push. That is Finder, the director's viewfinder with scouts, framelines, ghost frame and the sun and light planner. BLOCK, the overhead plan of where the cameras, the people and the objects stand. The shoot plan, the shot atlas, coverage and pickups. The nineteen camera department calculators. Verified data, provenance and the recording configuration snapshot. Round trip, which reads the card, the sound report and the camera and repairs the difference. Nothing is held back on the beta at the moment, and the beta panel says so in its own words rather than claiming credit for features the public already has.

The notice that travels with the code

SmartLog is free to use and the only thing it asks in return is that the people who asked for its features keep their credit. That notice sits at the top of the file, addressed to humans and to AI coding assistants alike, and it has been strengthened in this build. SmartLog is proprietary software and its source code, interface design and documentation may not be copied, redistributed or used to create a competing product without written permission from 3D Film Parts. The 3D Film Parts name, the SmartLog name, the wordmark, the logo and the app icons are not available for use by others. The app states plainly what it does with your work, which is nothing without your say so: no account, no profile, no tracking, no advertising, no analytics, and nothing you type is collected, sold or used to train any model.

What did not move

The printed camera report, the master CSV, the Silverstack file and the Drylab file all come out exactly as they did before this build for anyone typing in English or Spanish. That was checked by generating them from the same fixture on both builds and comparing the bytes.

shipped 22 August 2026

BLOCK is a flat plan of where the cameras, the people and the objects actually stand. SmartLog already knew what was planned, what the camera saw and what was recorded. It did not know where any of it was. Now you can put the cameras down on an overhead map of the set, point them, see the real frame each one covers, mark where the actors start and finish, draw the dolly move, step through the beats of a scene, and hand the whole thing to a director as a page. It lives inside Finder, because a spatial camera tool belongs with the other one: open Finder and BLOCK is on the bar beside SCOUTS.

It never invents a measurement, and that is the rule the whole thing is built on. A map with no scale on it says UNSCALED and refuses to answer in metres. Draw one line across something you know the size of, type what it really is, and every distance on that map becomes a real one and says CALCULATED FROM MAP SCALE. A camera body the database has no published sensor size for gets no frame cone at all rather than a plausible one.

What you can do with it

• A map of the set, on a phone. Pan, zoom with two fingers, drag anything, turn a camera by its handle, undo. Bring in a floor plan, a location photograph or a sketch and place the map on top of it. Every layer has its own switch: cameras, frame cones, people, paths, the line of action, lighting, focus distances and labels. Hiding a layer changes what is drawn and never deletes anything.
• Real frame cones, from the real camera. The cone drawn from each camera is the true horizontal angle of the recorded area, worked out from the manufacturer sensor size, the recording mode the camera is really set to and the focal length, through the same field of view maths the calculators on the CALC tab use. An ALEXA 35 on 4.6K open gate and a VENICE 2 on full frame draw different cones on the same 50mm, because they really are different.
• Camera in frame, said as a warning and not as a verdict. When one camera position falls inside another camera’s cone, the map says so. It says it MAY be in frame, because a flat plan does not know the camera heights, the tilt, or what is standing in the way, and one tap takes you into Finder to go and look through the lens instead of guessing.
• The line of action. Set an axis between two people and every camera is told which side of it it is on. If cameras end up on both sides it says CROSSES ESTABLISHED AXIS and stops there. Crossing the line is a decision directors make on purpose every day, so nothing here calls it wrong.
• Blocking beats. The same setup at different moments. John at the doorway, John crossing, John sat down. Add a beat, move the people and the camera to where they are then, and step between them. Nothing moves in the other beats, and a beat that is deleted takes only the positions it was holding.
• Movement paths, with a speed. A dolly, a Steadicam walk, a crane base or a tracking car, drawn as a run of points. It gives you the length, and once you type how long the move takes it gives you the average speed through the same move calculator that is already on the CALC tab.
• A focus map for the 1st AC. Camera to subject distance for every mark on the map, and near, far and total depth of field beside it, through exactly the same calculation the depth of field tool does, with the circle of confusion it used printed underneath. There is a focus pull view that reads the same mark through every beat as MARK A, MARK B, MARK C, the way it goes on the side of the lens.
• Coverage, straight off the shot plan. Planned setups come across carrying their camera, their lens and their focal length already on them. Show one, show a selection, or show the lot. It never makes a second shot plan: the map holds the planned shot’s own id and reads the plan you already made.
• Finder, both ways. Standing where the camera goes, add that position to the map from inside Finder with the body, the lens and the heading it was set to. Or pick any camera on the map and open it back in Finder with all of that loaded. What does not travel is a pretend accuracy: a phone GPS fix is metres wide and a phone compass on a film set is sitting inside a magnet, so Finder hands over context and you place the camera yourself.
• A lighting layer, from the diagrams you already have. Put one of this production’s own lighting diagrams under the map as a layer. It is the same picture the report prints. Nothing about it is copied, edited or moved.
• Planned beside actual. The camera that was planned and the camera that really went, both kept, with the offset in metres said the way a grip says it (0.8 m left and 0.3 m forward), the heading difference, and every optical difference listed. Nothing overwrites the plan, because a plan is an intention and a take is evidence, and a difference between them is not an error.
• Continuity maps, and a pickup that can find its way back. Save an established setup as a continuity map and it freezes the technical facts as they were on the day, so a change to the production months later cannot rewrite what camera A was really set to. Then on the pickup, put a pickup camera down and drag it until the difference reads matched: distance, heading and focal length, side by side with the original.
• Two diagram exports. CLEAN for a director or an AD: the map, who is where, what each setup is called. TECHNICAL for camera, grip and VFX: the frame cones, the bodies, the lenses, the focus distances, the heights and the geometry. PDF or PNG, one page per beat. The camera report itself is not touched by any of this.
• Measure anything. Two taps across the map. On a scaled map it reads in metres or feet, following the unit this production already uses. On an unscaled one it reads in map units and says so.

Finder: the saved frame that came back black

A scout frame saved out of Finder could come back as a black picture with perfect framelines drawn on it. It is fixed, and the cause was one line: the same function that draws the live overlay also burns the framelines into the saved photograph, and it began by clearing the canvas. On the live view that is right and necessary. On the saved frame the canvas IS the photograph, so the picture was wiped a moment after it was taken. Measured with a test camera across twelve capture cases (main and wide, portrait and landscape, spherical and anamorphic, squeezed and desqueezed, one frameline and three, calibrated and not): every saved frame now carries the real picture, with the framelines in exactly the place the live preview had them.

• The saved frame matches the live preview. The framing on the picture you keep is the framing you were looking at when you pressed save, and that is now checked case by case rather than assumed.
• The dim is a composing aid, not part of the photograph. The area outside the recorded frame is dimmed on the live view to stop you composing on picture that will not be there. It is no longer burned into the saved frame, which is meant to show a director what the location looks like.
• FULL SENSOR is only drawn when it is not the recorded frame. On a hand picked sensor, and on any camera recording its whole area, the two boxes are the same pixels, and drawing both put two labels on top of each other.
• A scout card no longer prints a separator with nothing in front of it. With no recording mode set on the camera, the card read “Recording mode . GATE APPROX”. It says the honest thing now.
• Everything Finder draws now follows the language. The Finder tab, the shortcut on the log and the Share door on the report were built once and never repainted, so on a Spanish device they sat in English for ever.

Reliability work, because a tool that loses things is not a tool

This round went looking for the ways BLOCK and Finder could lose your work, rather than waiting to be told. Every persistent thing either of them makes was run through the same sequence by hand and by harness: create it, save it, reload, edit it, save again, delete it, undo, reload again. Maps, cameras, marks, paths, beats, the axis, continuity maps, pickup positions, imported floor plans and scout frames.

• Nothing on the map could be touched, and now everything can. Every drag, rotate, pinch and tap-to-place in BLOCK went through one call that throws on some pointers, and a listener that throws is swallowed silently: the map rendered perfectly and did nothing at all. Found by driving real touches at the canvas rather than by asking whether a handler was attached.
• Undo no longer detaches what it restores. Undo used to replace the map’s contents wholesale, so an open panel or a drag in progress was writing into a record the map no longer contained. It merges by id now, and every object keeps its identity across an undo.
• An imported floor plan is safe from the cleanup sweep. A floor plan hangs off a map rather than a take, so the sweep that clears out orphaned pictures had to be taught about it, exactly as it was taught about scout frames. There is one list of what is in use and the sweep works from it.
• Deleting is deliberate, undoable and complete. Deleting a map asks first, takes its floor plan with it, leaves every other map’s picture alone, and comes back whole from the undo. Deleting an object takes its own path and nothing else. Deleting a beat takes only the positions that beat was holding.
• Every control was pressed. Every visible button on every screen, in every Setup section, in Finder and in BLOCK was pressed by the harness and made to prove that something actually happened: a sheet opened, the map changed, a file was written, a message appeared. 76 controls, none dead.
• And a button in the take form that had been quietly disappearing. Changing the slating convention between US and UK deleted the RECENT button off the shot field until the next reload, because the label was being rewritten in a way that threw its own contents away.

Spanish

BLOCK ships in Spanish from the first build, and so does Finder, which went out last time with no Spanish at all. That is 670 new phrases between them, in Peninsular Spanish, checked by opening every screen and every panel in Spanish and looking for anything still in English. Nothing that ships in English changed.

What this map cannot tell you, said plainly

• A real distance needs a calibrated map scale. Until you draw a line of known length the map has coordinates and no measurements, and it says UNSCALED rather than making one up.
• Camera in frame is a two dimensional warning. It does not know the heights, the tilt or the foreground. It says MAY, and it offers to let you go and look.
• The line of action informs, it does not police. It says which side each camera is on. It never says you are wrong.
• GPS and a phone compass are context, not a survey. Nothing here pretends a phone can place a camera on a stage map to the centimetre. You place it.
• No AI, no scanning, no 3D. It is a flat technical plan drawn by a person, and it works with no signal at all.

Every block a scene needs, and one of them is the one being shot

A scene is covered from several set-ups, so a scene holds several blocks. The manager groups them by scene, one of them is marked CURRENT for the scene the camera is on now, and the log knows which scene is in front of you and offers that scene’s blocks first. Search finds a block by its name, its scene, a planned shot or anything written on it. Pin the ones you keep coming back to.

• Duplicate a block and the copy is a separate thing with its own internal ids and its own copy of the floor plan. Editing the copy never reaches the original.
• Copy a block to another scene and it arrives without the planned shots and without the continuity map, because both of those belonged to the scene it came from.
• Save a block as a template for a room you shoot in again: a kitchen, an office, studio A, an interview position. A template keeps the room, the scale and the floor plan. It never keeps the scene, the planned shots or the continuity map, because none of those are properties of a room.
• Nothing waits for a save button. Every change writes, and the badge says SAVING and then SAVED only once the write really succeeded.

Icons, colours, and never colour alone

A mark on the map can be a person, a vehicle, a table, a chair, a bed, a door, a window, a screen, a product or a prop, and it can carry a colour so one person is easy to follow through the beats. The label and the icon are always drawn as well, so nothing on the map or on an export is ever told apart by colour alone. A camera left on Default keeps the colour this production already gives its letter, so A is the same red here, on the log and on the report.

A camera can read as its letter, as the camera body, or as both

CAM A tells a gaffer nothing on a job where the bodies are different from each other. A block can now read its cameras as CAM A, as ALEXA 35, or as both together, and any camera can be given a name of your own that wins over all of it. The body is the one this production already has on record for that letter, or one typed on the camera itself, and a camera with no body on record keeps its letter rather than inventing one.

Lighting on the plan, beside the natural light

Put a light down in one tap and fill in as much or as little as you like: the role a gaffer would call it, the fixture, the modifier, the colour temperature, the intensity and the beam spread. Drag its handle to aim it. Bounces, negative fill, diffusion and reflectors are drawn as grip marks rather than sources, because a floppy does not emit anything. Every fixture is optional and the map still draws.

The cone is a direction and a spread that you typed. It is a technical diagram, not a lighting simulation, and nothing here models what the fixture really throws.

Metres or feet, and the map does not move

Distances follow the production’s own unit, then your own preference, then the region this device is set to. A block can be switched on its own. Changing it changes how a number is written down and nothing else: nothing on the map moves.

Notes on the plan, a legend on every export

Leave a note where it belongs: KEEP CLEAR, cable run, the door that has to stay shut. The legend is built from what is really on the map, so it can never name a camera or a colour the drawing does not carry, and it is always drawn on an export because whoever reads the page was not standing there.

Every camera on the phone is calibrated on its own

A phone has two or three rear cameras and their fields of view are nothing like each other. Finder now finds them all, names them, and calibrates each one separately.

• DEVICE CAMERAS, in Setup under Finder and framing, lists every rear camera with its own state: calibrated and its measured angle, or not calibrated and why. Calibrate, recalibrate or reset one, or reset all of them.
• CALIBRATE ALL walks through the ones that are not done, one at a time, and moves on by itself as each is saved.
• The wizard says which camera you are pointing. MAIN, ULTRAWIDE or TELE where the phone gives real names; WIDE, MAIN or NARROW where only the measurements can tell them apart; and DEVICE CAMERA 2 of 3 where the browser will not say, rather than guessing at a lens.
• Calibration never leaks between cameras. Calibrating the main camera tells Finder nothing about the ultrawide, and Finder will not use one camera’s numbers for another.
• The badge follows the switch. When a frame will not fit and Finder moves to a wider camera, the preview says CALIBRATED or APPROXIMATE about the camera that is now running, and the notice names it.
• A changed phone does not confuse it. Browser updates and permission resets can hand out new camera ids, so a calibration is found again by signature, and only when exactly one camera matches. Anything ambiguous stays uncalibrated and says so.

A brighter picture in a dark room, and an honest word for it

Finder now carries an exposure control on the live camera row. Where the browser really gives exposure compensation on the camera that is running, it is called CAMERA EXPOSURE, it reads in EV, it uses the range the camera itself reports, and automatic exposure stays on. Where it does not, the picture is brightened on screen only, it is called PREVIEW BRIGHTNESS, and it says the camera was not touched. A scout frame saved with the display treatment on looks like what you were looking at and records that that is what it was.

Sun and light

Where the sun will be, for a place and a date, worked out on the device with no signal at all.

• On the log, a compact card for the shoot day: sunrise, morning golden hour, solar noon, evening golden hour, sunset, how long the daylight lasts, and where the sun is now.
• In the calculators, the full numbers: sunrise and sunset with their bearings, blue hour and golden hour at both ends, civil, nautical and astronomical twilight, the highest the sun gets, the whole day hour by hour, and the shadow a given height throws.
• In Finder, a sun path. The sun is marked on the live picture, with an arrow at the edge when it is behind you, and a time scrubber answers where will the sun be at five without leaving the viewfinder. The picture stays live: only the sun moves, and the row says so.
• Front, side and back light as geometry between where the camera is pointing and where the sun is. It is a direction, not an opinion, and it says nothing about whether anything is actually lit.
• On a blocking map, a sun layer, separate from the lighting layer so natural and artificial light stay legible on one plan. Set north with a rotatable arrow, because the top of an imported floor plan is not north just because floor plans are usually drawn that way.
• Matching a pickup to the original sun. A continuity map records the solar geometry it was saved under, and months later SmartLog searches the new date for the time the sun comes closest to where it was, then tells you how close: very close, close, approximate, or no close match on this date. It is matched on geometry, not on the clock.
• Polar regions are answered, not faked. Midnight sun and polar night are named, and no sunrise time is invented for a day that has none.

Solar geometry, not weather. SmartLog says where the sun will be. It does not promise you will see it, and there are no forecasts, no cloud and no weather services anywhere in it.

The log page decides how much room it has

The log is where the work happens, and three shortcuts stacked above it cost a phone most of a screen before a single take is visible. Finder, the blocking map and sun and light are now LOG QUICK TOOLS, and they follow the width of the log page rather than the name of the device, so an iPad in split view and a narrow desktop window get the same treatment a handset does.

• On a narrow screen they start folded away, and the log starts at the takes. Nothing is lost: Finder is still on the tab bar, the blocking map is still inside it, and sun and light is still in the calculators.
• On a wider one they show, because there is room.
• Switch any of them on or off yourself in Setup, under Log quick tools, with the app’s own switches. Your choice wins over the screen from then on and survives turning the phone, a split view and a resize. There is a Back to what the screen decides for putting it all back.
• Switched on where there is not much room, they are one compact line each that still says something useful: the camera Finder would open with, the current block for this scene, or sunrise, solar noon and sunset. Tap it for the full thing.
• Hiding a shortcut never turns a feature off. It is a shortcut.

Sun and light: where, then when, then the numbers

• Nobody types a latitude. Use the current position, take one off a take that was pinned earlier, use a place you saved, or type it if you want to. Whichever it is, the sheet says where the numbers came from: from the shoot day, from take SC 42/3, saved, or typed.
• Save this place keeps a rooftop or a studio for next time, and Save to the shoot day tells the whole day where it is happening, which the log card then uses too.
• Today, shoot day and another day each do what they say, show which one is on, and recalculate everything under them. The shoot day is the day SmartLog already knows about, not today: a scout on Monday looking at Friday gets Friday. Another day opens a real date and a time to choose.
• The clock these times are in is named, and can be moved for a location in another timezone, because sunrise at a place reads in that place’s own clock.
• If the device will not give a position because permission was refused, it timed out or there is no signal, it says which of those happened and leaves the other ways of setting one on screen.

Small things, and one of them is not small at all

• Every panel keeps its way out. BACK and DONE on the Finder panel are wired before the page inside them is drawn, and each row is built on its own, so the panel always closes and one awkward row can never take the whole screen with it.
• The calculator can find a position for you. Sun and light in the calculators takes its coordinates from the shoot day, a saved place, a take or Finder with one tap, or reads the current position itself.
• What you set is what the log shows. Save a place, use a take’s position or read the current one, and the log’s sun card is using it straight away and still using it after a reload.
• Nothing on these screens is silent. Removing the line of action, changing a state, saving a place: each says what it did.

Sun and light, drawn rather than listed

Sun and light answered the day in a list of times. It draws it now, so you can see where the sun is, where it goes and which way the shadows fall without reading a single number.

• A sun path you can look at. A compass with the horizon around the outside and straight up in the middle. The gold arc is the sun’s path across this day at this place, dashed where it is under the horizon, with sunrise and sunset marked at the bearings they really happen on. North, east, south and west are on the rim, so a bearing means something standing in a street.
• The chosen time is on it. A marker sits where the sun is at the minute you are looking at, with the shadow drawn from the centre running away from it. Drag the time and it moves. Rise, sunset and the whole day move with it.
• The day as a shape. Under the compass, the sun’s height across the whole twenty four hours, with the horizon through the middle, the golden hour in gold and the blue hour in blue, drawn where they really fall. Sunrise, solar noon and sunset are ticked on it.
• Shadows to scale. Say how tall the thing is and the shadow it throws is drawn beside it at the real ratio, with the metres or feet on the drawing and the direction it falls. Under the horizon it says there is no shadow rather than drawing one of infinite length.
• One tap to the times people plan around. Sunrise, golden hour morning, solar noon, golden hour evening, sunset, and now. Every drawing and every reading follows the tap.
• It says COPIED the moment it copies. Copy summary answers on the button itself, right under the finger, and only once the copy has actually gone through. If the device refuses, it says NOT COPIED and offers the text to select by hand rather than claiming a copy that never happened.
• And the summary is worth sending. Production, place, date and clock, then sunrise, both golden hours, solar noon, sunset, daylight, both blue hours and twilight, the sun’s position at the chosen minute, the shadow ratio in real lengths and the direction it falls, and the line that keeps it honest: this is solar geometry, not a weather forecast.
• It reads on the phone in your hand and on the screen on the cart. On a narrow phone the compass fills the width. On a tablet or a computer it grows to a sensible size and stops rather than stretching across the room.
• A saved place travels properly. What a position came from is stored as a kind rather than as a sentence, so a place saved on a Spanish phone reads in English on an English one, and the name you typed stays exactly as you typed it.

Thank you to the six of you testing this: Luca Ferraro, Aiko Tanaka, Thabo Mbeki, Élodie Marchand, Lucas Bennett and Sofia Ribeiro. The black frame was found because one of you photographed it.

shipped 21 August 2026

FINDER is a director's viewfinder built into SmartLog, and it has its own tab on the bottom bar now: LOG, FINDER, REPORT, CALC, SETUP. Tapping it opens the live picture straight away rather than a menu. Share has moved inside REPORT, with every export, the backup and team sync exactly where they were.

The thing that makes it different is the same sentence the calculators are built on: a generic viewfinder app asks you to type the sensor, the lens and the aspect ratio every time you open it, and SmartLog already knows all three. It knows the camera body on this job, the recording mode it is really set to, the sensor millimetres from the manufacturer, the lens kit, the physical lenses with their squeeze, the planned shots and the takes you have already logged. Point the phone at a location and you are looking at your frame, on your camera, on your glass.

And it opens ready to work. The camera letter, the focal length, the sensor and the delivery frames come back exactly as you left them. On a job you have never opened it on, it starts from the camera and the focal length of your last take, so a second unit opens on the B camera rather than on the A. The lens wheel is your production's own kit, not a generic list.

There is one honest rule that outranks everything else in here, and it is written on the picture rather than buried: a phone lens is not a published figure. SmartLog knows your cinema camera exactly, and it cannot know the field of view of the camera in your hand, because nobody publishes it and it is different for the ultrawide, the main and the tele. So until you calibrate the phone, every preview says APPROXIMATE PREVIEW and every frame you save says it too. Calibrate the one that is running, which takes a tape measure and a door frame, and it becomes a measurement.

The camera feed never leaves the device, there is no network call anywhere in it, and nothing in FINDER ever writes to a take. A scout frame is an intention photographed on a recce; a take is what the camera really recorded. The two are kept apart on purpose and nothing here rewrites the other.

• The phone camera follows the lens. Choose a 12mm and it moves to the ultrawide as you choose it. Go back to a 50 and it comes back to the main camera, because the narrowest camera that can still hold the frame gives the best picture. It re-reads the choice whenever the framing changes: the focal length, the camera body, the sensor or the delivery ratio. If nothing on the device is wide enough it says so plainly, and it never shrinks the frame to fit, which would put the framelines in the wrong place and lie about the framing.
• One menu, with a way back. SETUP, SCOUTS, SAVE FRAME and CLOSE sit on one row under the picture. Everything else lives in a menu of six pages, and each row tells you what it is set to before you open it: the camera and sensor, the lens and squeeze, the framing, the reference, position and sun, compare and capture. Every page has a back button and a done button, and the menu floats over the picture instead of shrinking it, so the viewfinder keeps the whole screen.
• The recorded area, not just the sensor. Full sensor, recorded area and delivery frame drawn as separate lines, worked out from the manufacturer's raster and the sensor mode rather than a rounded guess. Everything outside the recorded frame is dimmed, which is the single most useful thing a viewfinder does: it stops you composing on picture that is not going to be there.
• Several deliveries at once. A 2.39 primary, a 16:9 protect and a 9:16 social pull off one negative, on screen together. Each carries its own dash pattern, its own weight and its own printed label rather than being told apart by colour alone, because a viewfinder gets used in sunlight, by people with every kind of colour vision, and the frame gets printed in black and white.
• Your own glass on the wheel. The production lens kit first, then the physical lens register where it knows one, so a chip can read 35mm #17 and the frame records which actual lens shot it. Zooms give you their stops. Anything else, type it.
• Anamorphic. The squeeze comes from the lens or the recording mode, you can look at it squeezed or desqueezed, and the delivery line is drawn on the real gate rather than on the desqueezed shape.
• A level and a horizon you can trust. Tilt and roll are worked out from gravity rather than from the raw sensor angles, which is what keeps the line true with the phone held upright at eye level, turned into landscape, and rolled past a quarter turn. Point the lens at the floor and it tells you the roll cannot be read, instead of drawing a line that means nothing: with the lens straight down there is no horizon to be level with. It is a device measurement and every surface says so. It is offered rather than switched on for you, and once you turn it on it stays on.
• Where the sun will be. Sunrise, sunset, azimuth and elevation for now, for the shoot day, or for a time you choose, worked out on the device from solar geometry. It is never a weather forecast and it does not pretend to be one.
• Save a scout frame. The picture with the framelines burned into it, and with it the camera, the recording mode, the lens, the squeeze, the heading, the tilt, the position and the sun. The pixels are grabbed the instant you press the button, so what you save is the frame you were looking at.
• Straight into your photos. On by default. Saving a frame hands it to your phone's own share sheet with the picture ready, so Save Image puts it in the camera roll and Save to Files keeps it as a file, and it tells you which one happened. No browser on any phone can write into a photo library on its own, so the share sheet is the way in, and this says so rather than pretending otherwise.
• Line it up against what you shot. Put a scout frame, a planned shot or the continuity reference over the live picture at whatever opacity you want, and match the heading and the tilt you stood at last time. It compares, it never steers, and a difference is reported as a difference rather than as an error.
• Compare two lenses or two bodies. A against B, split down the middle or flicking between the two, with the equivalent focal length on the other sensor worked out for you. Useful for settling what a 40 on full frame really gives you against a 32 on Super 35.
• Capture a lens series. Walk the whole kit from one position and get a contact sheet of every focal length, which is the thing a director actually wants to look at on a recce.
• The scout book. Every location with its frames, its sun times and the camera department notes, and a PDF of the lot to send. Reachable from SCOUTS on the viewfinder bar, so there is one gallery in one place.
• Straight onto the shot plan. A scout frame can create a planned shot or fill in the gaps on one that already exists, and it only ever fills a gap: a lens or a delivery somebody already wrote down is left exactly as they wrote it.
• Scout, planned, actual, continuity, pickup. The whole visual history of a setup side by side, months later, with each stage standing for a different thing and none of them rewriting the one before it.
• Share cards. One clean image for a director and one technical one for the crew, off the same frame.

FINDER asks for the camera when you open it and never at launch, and it carries on working without it: with the camera declined or unavailable you still get the framelines, the calculations, the scout book and every export. The FINDER screens are in English for this round while the rest of the app stays in both languages, and Spanish for them is on the way.

shipped 21 August 2026

A film set already runs on arithmetic. Depth of field, where to stand for the frame you want, what a frame rate change costs in stops, whether the cards last until wrap, whether the batteries do. Most of it gets done on a phone, in an app that knows nothing about the job you are on, so every single time you type the sensor, the lens, the stop and the frame rate again before you get an answer.

This round is nineteen camera department calculators built into SmartLog, and the thing that makes them different is one sentence: a generic calculator asks you to enter everything, and SmartLog already knows half of it. Open the depth of field calculator on a job and the buttons at the top say USE THE A CAMERA and USE THIS TAKE. Tap one and the sensor, the lens, the stop and the focus distance are already in. They live on the CALC tab, above the media and power calculator that was already there, which has not moved and has not changed.

And every one of them still works with nothing filled in. There is no production to set up first and no camera to pick. A 2nd AC standing on somebody else’s set can open it and type four numbers, which is most of why anybody reaches for a calculator on a set at all.

Lens

• Depth of field. Near limit, far limit, the depth between them and the hyperfocal distance, worked out from the sensor you are really on rather than a generic Super 35. Turn on the two focus marks and it shows the depth at each end of the pull and whether anything stays sharp all the way through, which is the question a focus puller is actually asking.
• Field of view. What the lens covers and how wide the frame is at the subject. Or turn it round: say the frame has to be 1.8 metres wide and it tells you where to stand on every focal length in the kit, so you can pick the lens before you move the camera.
• Sensor match. Changing body mid job. The focal length that frames the same subject the same way on the new sensor, and the nearest lens you actually have, with the percentage you are out by so you know how far to move.

Exposure

• Exposure match. Go from 24fps at 180 degrees to 120fps at 180 degrees and it tells you that costs 2.32 stops, then gives you the three ways to put them back: pull that much ND, raise the EI by that much, or open the iris by that much, each with the exact value to dial in. It changes the frame rate, the shutter, the stop, the EI and the ND in one calculation.
• Shutter angle and speed. The same shutter written both ways at the frame rate you are on, and how far it is from 180 degrees in stops.
• Flicker-safe shutter. Shutter angles whose exposure lasts a whole number of the light’s own cycles, on 50Hz mains, 60Hz mains, or a fixture you know the frequency of. It gives you every compatible angle and picks out the one closest to where you wanted to be.
• ND and stops. What a stack of filtration really costs, densities and ND numbers both read, and what to do about it when a filter comes out.

Frame

• Anamorphic and crop. Desqueeze the raster the camera is really recording, take the delivery ratio out of it, and see the final raster, how many pixels go, which side they come off and how much of the frame survives. It also gives you the figure to set the camera’s own frame marker to, counted in the pixels the camera writes rather than the desqueezed ones.
• Camera geometry. Lens height, the height of what you are pointing at, the distance and the tilt. Give it any three and it solves the fourth, for matching a setup back or building one to a storyboard.

Motion

• Slow motion. How long a high speed take runs once it is cut in, or the other way round: how long the action has to actually last to fill the cut you need. Give it a data rate and it tells you what the take costs in media.
• Timelapse. Interval, frame count, how long you are really standing there and how long it runs on the timeline, forwards or backwards.
• Camera move. How fast the dolly has to travel for the move to work, in metres or feet a second, and how long it lasts once the frame rate has had its way with it.

Timecode

• Timecode calculator. Add, subtract, take a duration between two points, and go between timecode and a frame count. It is drop frame aware and it crosses midnight properly, because it uses the same arithmetic the timecode repair does. One set of maths, so a value here and a value there can never disagree.
• Timecode drift. Jammed at seven, checked at half one, three frames out. It tells you the drift rate, what it lands at by wrap, and how often the box needs checking to stay inside a frame. If you have been logging timecode checks it reads your own.

Media

• Offload time. How long the card takes to come off, to one destination or several, with or without a checksum pass. It knows the difference between copying to two places one after the other and reading the card once while writing both, and it names which end of the chain is holding it up.
• Production storage. What the whole shoot needs, cameras on different codecs included, with headroom and the copies on top. Camera originals and the total that has to exist in the world, kept apart.
• Will we make wrap. The four in the afternoon question, both halves of it. Does the media last, and what time do the cards run out if it does not. Does the copy finish, and what time does the last one land.

Power

• Rig power. Everything hanging off the camera added up against the pack you are really running: the theoretical runtime, the runtime worth planning on, and the packs the day needs.
• Battery rotation. Not how many batteries to bring, which SmartLog already answered. Whether the batteries you have plus the charger you have can keep the rig running all day, and if they cannot, roughly which hour somebody starts waiting on a charger.

It fills itself in from the job

This is the part a generic calculator cannot do. Depending on the tool, the buttons across the top offer you the A camera, the B camera, this take, the last take, the continuity reference, the recording mode the camera is set to, the card and battery on the calculator screen, your production’s lens kit, an anamorphic squeeze off your own lens register, the shoot schedule, what today has already recorded, and your last timecode check. Nothing is applied until you tap it.

Send an answer back to the take

Work out 172.8 degrees for the lights you are under and the flicker tool offers to put it in the take. It shows you a preview naming the field, what is there now and what would replace it, and nothing is written until you tap. It goes into the take form rather than into a saved take, so you still have to save it and you can still change your mind, the toast undoes it, it will not write into a field you have switched off in your report setup, and the take remembers that the value came from a calculator rather than from somebody typing.

What it will not do

• It will not invent a number. Sensor sizes come from the manufacturer database or from a named film format that prints its own source next to the answer. A camera the database has no figure for says so instead of quietly using a plausible one.
• It will not call an estimate a fact. Every answer is labelled CALCULATED, ESTIMATED or STARTING POINT. Timecode arithmetic is calculated. A battery runtime is estimated, and it says why.
• It will not promise you a clean frame. The flicker tool is a starting point and never anything else: LED drivers, dimmers and the way the sensor reads the frame out can all still cause flicker, so it tells you to test the actual camera and the actual fixture together.
• It will not go online. Every calculator is arithmetic over data already on your device, so all nineteen work with no signal, which is where most of them get used.

Everything is in Spanish as well as English, everything reads on a 320 pixel phone, and you can pin the two or three you actually use so they are one tap from the tab. The camera report, the CSV, the Silverstack file and the Drylab file are untouched by this round: they come out byte for byte as they did before it.

shipped 21 August 2026

Every version of SmartLog so far has been able to tell you what happened. None of them has been able to tell you what was meant to happen. This round adds the half of the day that comes before the camera report: the coverage the camera department set out to get, sitting beside the coverage it actually got, and what still has to be shot.

The rule underneath all fourteen features is one sentence: a plan is an intention and a take is evidence. SmartLog never rewrites one into the other. If the plan said 75mm and the take says 100mm, both are true, both are kept, and months later when somebody has to shoot the pickup, knowing both is the entire point. Nothing here is required: without a shot plan, SmartLog behaves exactly as it does today.

Bring your shot list in, however it was written

Nobody types a shot list twice. SmartLog reads the one you already have.

• Paste it straight in. 42A | MASTER | 32mm on a line is a shot, and so is the same line separated by dashes. It is the shape people actually type into a message the night before.
• Copy a block of cells out of a spreadsheet and paste that. Tab separated columns are read as columns.
• Or pick a CSV. The separator is worked out from the file rather than assumed, so a comma file and a semicolon file both read. A European spreadsheet exports semicolons and that has cost this app real time before.
• Column names are matched in plain language: scene, shot, setup, description, camera, lens, focal, rig, movement, filter, notes. A file with no header row is read in the order people write: shot, title, focal.
• 42A becomes scene 42, shot 42A. A plan written only in shot numbers still files itself under the right scene.
• Everything is read on your device. A shot list is exactly the kind of document people are under an NDA about, and this one never goes anywhere.
• You see every shot before any of it lands, and anything already in your plan is marked as a duplicate and left out unless you say otherwise. Nothing is created silently and nothing is dropped silently.

Today’s shot queue, built for one hand at six in the morning

A working list of the coverage planned for today. One line per shot, what it is, what it got to, and a big Start button.

• Tap START and SmartLog opens the ordinary New Take form with the scene, the slate and the camera already filled in, and the take linked to that planned shot. It is not a different kind of take and it never becomes one.
• Filters for all, not started, in progress, shot, pickups, on hold and dropped.
• A shot that has takes shows how many and how many are circled. A shot that has none shows what was planned for it instead: the focal, the glass, the rig.

Planned versus actual, and a difference is not an error

Open any planned shot and see the setup that was intended beside the setup that was used.

• Focal, T-stop, camera, lens, rig, frame rate, filters, height, focus distance, ISO, colour temp and shutter, wherever both sides carry a value.
• A change reads 75mm to 100mm. An unchanged value gets a tick. A planned value with nothing logged against it says so rather than inventing a difference.
• It says changed from plan, never wrong. A DP changing a lens on the floor is the job, not a mistake, and the app that scolds people for it is the app they stop opening.
• 100 and 100mm are the same value. The comparison uses the same normaliser that reads imported files, so a difference in wording is never reported as a difference in fact.

Where each shot got to, worked out rather than ticked

Nobody is going to tick a box after every setup, so SmartLog works it out from the takes.

• One real take makes a shot SHOT. A false roll does not, because a false roll is not coverage.
• Hold, dropped and pickup required are yours to set, and they win over anything derived.
• SHOT means valid coverage exists. It does not mean circled, approved, referenced or technically good, and nothing in the app pretends otherwise.

Coverage against the plan, which is not the wrap check

The wrap check asks whether your log adds up. This asks a different question: did the day capture what the department set out to capture? A log can be perfect and still be missing the insert.

• A count of what was planned, what was shot, what was dropped and what is unresolved.
• Then the shots that are outstanding, and why: no take logged, on hold, pickup required, no circled take, no reference frame, or planned for two cameras with one logged.
• None of these is automatically a fault and the wording never says it is. Plenty of productions never circle a take. A check that cries wolf is a check people switch off.
• The plan exports as a CSV with both sides on it, for the people who live in a spreadsheet.

Pickups, which are a shooting requirement and not a to-do

An open item gets chased. A pickup gets shot. They are kept apart on purpose.

• Raise one from a planned shot, from a take, or from a coverage gap, with a reason: not shot, focus, performance, VFX, clean plate, continuity, technical, client request, or your own words.
• Move it to a future shoot day, or leave it on the list until somebody deals with it.
• A pickup never clears itself. A later take on the same shot is evidence somebody went back, not proof they got what was missing, and a pickup that closes itself is a pickup nobody shoots.
• The list exports as a PDF and as a CSV.

Load the planned setup, without it ever touching your card

A planned shot can carry technical intent, and one button puts it into the take form.

• You see every value it would write, and anything already filled in is shown so you can see what would be replaced. Fill only the empty fields, or replace what is there too.
• The card, the clip, the timecode, the take number, the circle and the rating are never written by a plan. A plan that could write a circle would be a plan that says a take was good before it was shot.
• A value that arrived from a plan says so afterwards, under where did this come from, which is a different fact from an edit.
• One undo puts the form back the way it was.

To shoot it again, match the reference and not the plan

For reproducing a setup weeks later, the original plan is the wrong thing to copy. What matters is what was actually shot and what the continuity reference says.

• The original plan, the actual setup and the actual reference, side by side.
• SmartLog recommends the reference, because matching the plan gives you a shot that does not cut with the one already in the edit. It recommends and applies nothing on its own.

The takes grouped into the setups they were really shot on

A scene is not a list of takes, it is a handful of camera setups with takes inside them, and now SmartLog reads it that way.

• Grouped from what the takes have in common: the planned shot if there is one, then camera, scene, setup and glass. Deterministic, from your own metadata, with nothing guessed.
• Merge two setups, split one back apart, or give one a name.
• A planned shot always outranks the grouping, because an explicit link beats an inference.

The shot atlas, which is the technical log as a picture

Every setup with the frame you would recognise it by, in a grid that fits a phone.

• The picture is the reference still you chose, then the reference take, then any frame on the shot. It never changes on its own, because an atlas whose pictures shuffle every time you open it is no use as a memory.
• Setups nobody planned are in there too, marked as not planned, because they still happened.
• Tap one for the takes, the circled takes, the exact glass, the exposure and the geometry.

A storyboard of the coverage you really shot

Not a drawn storyboard. A contact sheet of actual camera coverage for a scene, which is the thing an editor or a VFX supervisor asks for and nobody has.

• A PDF, three across, with the frame, the title, the scene and the setup.
• Two profiles: clean carries the frame and the identity, technical adds the camera metadata. Clean stays clean.
• Frames are fitted, never cropped, on screen and on paper. A crop can crop off the very thing the frame was shot to record.

A pickup pack, so the camera goes back where it was

One document with everything needed to reproduce a setup, ready to hand to whoever is shooting it.

• The original plan. The actual setup with the body, the serial, the physical lens, the focal, the stop, the EI, the shutter, the frame rate, the filtration, the white balance and the LUT.
• The continuity reference with its frame, the focus distance, the camera geometry and the heading.
• The circled take, anything related, and any earlier pickup attempts.
• Exports as a PDF, and Match Frame opens straight from it.

A different front door depending on what you do on set

SmartLog is big enough now that a loader and a 2nd AC should not be looking at the same first screen.

• Six choices: everything, 2nd AC, loader, 1st AC, DIT and read only.
• A 2nd AC gets new take, the shot queue, coverage, the atlas, open items and search. A loader gets media and cards, round trip, open items, the report, the queue and search. A DIT gets media, round trip, reports, handoff receipts, confidence and search.
• Read only shows the atlas, coverage, pickups and search, and puts nothing destructive on screen.
• It only changes what is in front of you first. Nothing is hidden, nothing is locked, and every feature stays exactly where it is in the app.

One search across the whole production

Search stops being about takes and starts being about the job.

• Type John CU and get the planned shot, the setup it was shot on, every take, and whether a pickup is outstanding, grouped rather than in one flat list.
• It reaches the plan, the takes, the setups, the pickups, the open items and the camera events.
• planned:true, pickup:true and reference:true narrow it, and the commands that were already there still work.

And the Beta Lab panel now tells you the truth

Tapping the build number used to list eleven features, and every one of them had already gone out to everybody months of builds ago. It has been rebuilt.

• It now lists only the features the public app has not got, grouped by the round they came from, each with what it does and where to find it. When a round goes public it comes off that list by itself rather than when somebody remembers.
• Send beta feedback now sends something worth reading: the build, which beta rounds actually installed, your device, the storage, the backup and cloud state and what the app was doing before it went wrong, plus a box to say what happened. You see the whole report first, and it never includes your production name, scenes, notes, clip names, lens or crew names, photographs, or where you were.
• Keep screen awake and Start next shoot day moved to Setup, where everybody has them, instead of sitting on the tester panel pretending to be new.

What this round deliberately does not touch

• The camera report is unchanged. So are the Silverstack and Drylab files, which are contracts with somebody else’s software.
• No take gains a field. The plan and the link to it live on the production, so backup, restore, project park and team sync all carry them with no new plumbing.
• Without a shot plan, every screen behaves exactly as it does today.

shipped 21 August 2026

Every camera report app, this one included, has only ever been able to tell you one thing: what the camera department wrote down. It has never been able to tell you what the media says. Those two are not the same document, and on a hard day they drift apart in ways nobody notices until an editor is three weeks into the cut and a clip has no paperwork behind it.

This round closes that loop. SmartLog can now read the actual list of files on the card, the CSV that came back from the DIT, the report the sound recordist wrote, and metadata a camera produced, put all of it beside the log, and show you exactly where the two stories disagree. Then it can repair the log, in the ways that are safe to automate, with a preview first and an undo afterwards. It is called Round trip and it sits in Setup.

The rule underneath all twelve features is one sentence: an imported file is evidence, never truth. Nothing you open here writes into a take. It is read, matched to the takes it is about, shown to you as a difference, and applied only when you pick it. Every accepted change lands in that take’s own history, records which file it came from, and comes back out with a single undo. There is no import button anywhere in this round that silently overwrites your work, because the whole thing is built so that there cannot be one.

Reconcile a card against the files that are actually on it

Card reconcile has always asked the loader for one number: how many gigabytes came off. That number can tell you something is wrong. It cannot tell you which clip.

• Give SmartLog the file list. Paste the names, open a TXT or CSV the offload software produced, or on a desktop browser point it at the card folder and it reads the names, sizes and modification dates the file system already exposes.
• No video is ever opened, nothing is uploaded and nothing is hashed. A 400 GB card lists in a moment because listing the names is genuinely all that happens. It works with no connection at all.
• A card is not only clips. Thumbnails, sidecars, proxies, low res streams and whatever the operating system dropped on it are recognised and counted separately, so a perfectly good card does not report forty phantom unlogged takes.
• It understands how cameras really name files, so A005C001.mov, A005C001.mxf and A001C003_250803_R1AB are matched as the clips they are rather than as three different strings. ARRIRAW and REDCODE clips that are folders rather than files are handled too.

Find the clip nobody logged, which is the expensive one

• Log versus media gives you three answers: clips the log and the card agree on, clips the log expects that are not on the card, and clips on the card that no take accounts for.
• That last one is the one that costs money. An unlogged clip will not be on the camera report, will not be in the rushes anybody goes looking through, and will be found by an assistant editor in three weeks or by nobody at all. One tap turns it into a real take with its clip number, card and camera already filled in, marked as recovered so the history says where it came from.
• A clip the log expects but the card does not carry is usually a part offload or a clip that belongs to another card. SmartLog never deletes anything: it shows you the take, and you decide.
• Anything you cannot settle on the spot becomes a follow up rather than being forgotten.

Bring the DIT’s own file back into the log

Data has only ever travelled one way out of a camera report app. If the DIT corrected a lens serial or post found the focal length was wrong, that correction lived in their system and never came home.

• Open a Silverstack CSV, a Drylab file, a SmartLog master CSV or a sound report that came back from the DIT or from post. SmartLog reads it, works out which take each row is about, and lists what disagrees with what you hold.
• Anything else with a header row can be mapped by hand, column by column, and the mapping is remembered by the shape of the file. The spreadsheet a rental house or a post facility sends every Friday is recognised the following Friday without being asked again.
• It handles the awkward realities of other people’s files: comma, semicolon and tab delimited, European CSVs, quoted commas, mixed line endings, duplicate column names, empty rows and spreadsheet cells that begin with an equals sign.
• It says why it matched each row, in words: clip name and camera both match, scene and take match one take, timecode within two frames. A row it is not sure about is marked possible and is never applied on its own.
• It refuses to be clever where being clever is dangerous. A clip number that exists on two cameras is reported as ambiguous rather than guessed at, and scene, take, roll and camera can never be rewritten by an import at all, because changing those re-keys the take.

One correction screen, and it starts with nothing selected

• Every difference, whatever found it, is reviewed the same way: what SmartLog holds now, what arrived, and what the result would be. Keep yours, use theirs, or type your own.
• Nothing is preselected and the pending count starts at zero, so the screen cannot do anything at all until you decide. For a source you trust there is one deliberate button that stages the lot and tells you how many it staged, still without writing.
• Apply a whole reviewed batch in one gesture, and undo the whole batch in one. Each accepted value records the file it came from, so months later a long press on the field says imported from a Silverstack CSV rather than leaving you to wonder.
• Formatting is not a difference. 50 and 50mm are the same focal length, T2.8 and 2.8 are the same stop, 5600 and 5600K are the same colour temperature. A compare screen full of noise is a compare screen nobody reads.

Repair a timecode offset across a whole range

The A camera was eight frames out from 13:42 until the 15:06 rejam. Until now that meant opening twenty seven takes and retyping two timecodes into each of them.

• Pick the camera, the range and the offset in frames, and see every take that would move, and what it would move to, before any of them do.
• Durations are untouched, because both ends shift by the same amount. Takes with no timecode cannot be shifted and are reported rather than quietly skipped, so the count you are told is the count that moves.
• It does the arithmetic properly at 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30 and drop frame, it handles midnight in both directions, and it will never write a timecode that does not exist. Other cameras and takes outside the range are not touched.
• The whole repair is one line in each take’s history and one undo.

Renumber a scene or a run of takes, safely

• Scene 42B should have been 42C. Takes 3 to 8 should have been 4 to 9. Rename or shift, and see every before and after first.
• If the new numbering would land on a take that already exists, SmartLog refuses outright and shows you the clash. Two takes sharing a number do not stay two takes: they fold into one on the next backup restore, import or team sync, and one of them is gone. A renumber tool without that check is a delete tool with a friendly name.
• A take number keeps its shape, so 03 becomes 04 and a pick up numbered 3PU becomes 4PU.
• The clip, the card, the timecode, the camera, the body and the glass are never touched. A renumber corrects what a take was called, never what it was.

Sound files, offered rather than assumed

• Open the report the sound recordist already produced and SmartLog offers a filename for each take it can match, by scene and take or by timecode, and tells you which of those it used.
• A take marked MOS is held back and counted. A take shot without sound has no sound file, so suggesting one is answering a question whose only right answer is that there isn’t one. It takes an explicit tap to include them.
• No guessing at filename conventions and nothing automatic. It links the sound roll and the filename and stops there, because SmartLog is not becoming a sound report and the recordist is never going to use it.

What actually changed since you sent the report

• SmartLog already knew whether the report was stale. Now it can tell you exactly what a new one would say differently, take by take and field by field: lens 35mm to 50mm, note added, take recovered, body serial corrected.
• Every export gets a revision number, so there is such a thing as report v4 and report v5.
• Save a short amendment listing only what moved since the last one. A DIT holding v4 wants the difference, not another fourteen pages to compare by eye.

Handoffs and open items, for the parts of the day that are not takes

• Record that the card went to the DIT at 14:32, or that the report was delivered, with who took it and how. The wording stays honest: it says recorded as handed to, never confirmed, because nothing left your device and nothing came back to prove otherwise.
• Open items are somewhere to put the thing you cannot deal with while the camera is turning over. Raise one from a take, a card or a mismatch, give it an owner, and resolve it later with the outcome kept. They are not errors and they are not red: three open items on a busy day is somebody doing their job properly.

Two devices, two answers, and nothing thrown away

This is the reliability change, and it matters most on a shared job.

• When the loader’s iPad and the A camera phone both edit the same take, SmartLog compares each of them against what the two devices last agreed on. If only one side changed a field, that edit simply arrives. If both changed the same field to different values, it keeps both answers and asks you, and the take wears a CONFLICT chip until you choose.
• Neither value is lost in the meantime, and the history records what you picked and what you turned down, which is the half you want six weeks later.
• It works when both devices were offline and reconnect later, which is when this actually happens.

Two smaller things that came out of building it

• Timecode edits are now recorded in a take’s history. That mattered little when timecodes were typed one at a time and matters a great deal now a single repair can move twenty seven of them.
• The log search understands four new words: CONFLICT, FOLLOW UP, IMPORTED and RECOVERED.

All of it is in Spanish as well as English, all of it works with no connection, and nothing you import is uploaded anywhere. The files stay on your device and are read on your device. Your Silverstack and Drylab exports are unchanged: those are contracts with somebody else’s software and this round adds nothing to either of them.

shipped 20 August 2026

SmartLog now keeps three different things apart that everything else runs together: a value it has, a value it knows the source of, and a value a person has actually checked. A manufacturer figure is not proof your camera was set that way. A complete take is not a checked take. An export that wrote without an error is not an export that imported. This round is about being able to tell which is which, on a real shooting day, on a phone.

Recording configuration, straight from the manufacturer

• SmartLog carries 87 camera bodies and 575 recording modes read out of the manufacturers' own documents. Those modes are now something you can put on a camera and on a take, not just a calculator resource. Pick 4.6K 3:2 Open Gate ARRIRAW on an ALEXA 35 and the take records the raster, the codec, the frame rate, the data rate, and which ARRI document that rate came from.
• Every take keeps its own copy. Change the camera at three in the afternoon and the morning still says what the morning was shot on. Update the database next month and a take from last month does not move.
• A custom or manual mode is a first class citizen and always will be. Type your own label, codec, raster and rate for a firmware nobody has published. It is recorded as yours and never dressed up as published data.
• One tap on any mode shows where the figure came from: the manufacturer, the document, the revision, where in it, the date it was read and the database version. All of it stored on the phone, so it answers with no signal.

Warnings that know what your equipment can do

• Log 120 fps on a mode published to 75 and SmartLog says so, beside the field, while you can still see it. Keep the value and it keeps exactly what you typed. You are standing next to the camera and it is reading a document.
• A warning only ever fires where there is real published data behind it. No document, no warning. A camera that captures into internal memory and saves afterwards is never nagged about minutes per card, and a published write ceiling for a whole camera is never treated as the rate for one mode.
• The lens register you already fill in now checks your optics. 320mm logged on a lens registered 24 to 290, a T-stop outside the registered range, a focus distance that cannot exist, a physical lens number that is not in the register. All questions, never corrections, and a doubler is a perfectly good answer.

Where did this value come from

• Long press any field label on a take and SmartLog tells you where that value came from: typed on this device, carried by Smartfill from the previous take, taken from the camera setup, read out of the manufacturer database, measured by the phone, arrived in an import, arrived from a teammate, matched from a continuity reference, or rebuilt when the take was recovered.
• Touch a field and it becomes yours. Whatever put the value there first stops being the story the moment a person types.
• A take logged before this build says so, plainly, and nothing is invented for it. Where a value came from is not the same question as what has been edited since, and the take history already answers that one.

Verified takes, and how much data is on the card

• Switch on take verification and a saved take gains a VERIFY action, meaning a person deliberately checked its technical metadata against the camera display, the camera menu, the DIT, or the continuity setup. It is separate from complete and separate from post ready, and a take can be one without the other.
• Edit a technical field afterwards and the verification says VERIFY AGAIN rather than quietly staying green. Editing the note or the description does not touch it, because rewriting prose is not the same as changing the ISO.
• Every take with a duration and a known recording mode carries an estimate of how much it recorded. A card adds them up: logged duration, estimated data, and what is still missing. It refuses to guess where guessing would be dishonest, and says which of those it is doing.
• The loader can enter what actually came off the card and see the difference. A large gap is the cheapest way there is to find a clip nobody logged, an off-speed take, or a recording mode set one way on the camera and another way in the log. SmartLog lists what is worth checking and does not pretend to know which one it is.

Prove your handoff to post, once, on prep day

• SmartLog writes Silverstack, Drylab, Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut and master CSV files correctly. Whether the system at your end reads them the way your production needs is something only your production can find out. So SmartLog makes a small, obviously fake test package, you push it through your real pipeline once, and you record what arrived.
• Seven test rows covering the mappings that actually break: an ordinary take, a circled take, a lens serial, punctuation and accents, a second camera, a second roll, and an off-speed MOS take. Every row is scened SMARTLOG_PIPELINE_TEST, so it is easy to find and easy to delete.
• After that the production knows, rather than hopes. This exists because Rafael Giuliano, a DIT in Brazil, spent three rounds proving that an export which writes perfectly can still land as nothing at all.

One screen that says whether the day is safe

• Production confidence puts the whole picture on one screen: copies off this device, deleted take recovery, team sync, report freshness, cards reconciled, which pipelines are verified, wrap check, post ready, human verified takes and technical anomalies.
• It reads the systems that already own those facts and never keeps a second copy of any of them. A grey circle means your production does not use that part, which is not a problem, and red is kept for something genuinely serious.
• Technical anomalies get their own screen, separate from wrap check. Wrap check asks whether the log is complete. This asks whether what the log says is plausible for the equipment. Keep any finding as logged, with an explanation if you want one, and it will not ask again unless the value changes.

Scan a lens, a body or a card

• SmartLog makes a QR code for every lens in your register, every camera body with a serial and every card you have logged. Print one, stick it on the barrel or the wallet, and scanning it opens that thing: the lens onto the open take, the body into a body swap, the card into its reconcile.
• It only ever acts on a SmartLog or SmartPrep code. Any other QR code in the world is ignored, and no new database is created for any of it.

Rate a take without opening it

• Every take on the log now carries its own stars. Tap them, tap a star, done: two taps from the log instead of opening the take, finding the field, setting it and saving. Tap the star that is already lit to clear the rating.
• An unrated take shows a dim row of outlines, so the door is visible without shouting. It only appears at all when your production has ratings switched on.

Quick export whatever you have filtered to

• Filter the log down to what you want, by camera, roll, scene, circled takes, star rating, a search, or any combination, and a QUICK EXPORT button appears in the filter bar with the count on it. One tap gives you a camera report PDF, a master CSV, a Silverstack CSV or timeline markers for exactly those takes.
• It says how many takes it holds, out of how many are in the log, and names the filters that made the selection, on the button and again on the sheet. Every other export in the app still carries the whole log, which is what you send when somebody asks for the day.
• The button is only there while a filter is actually on. With nothing filtered there is no selection to export.

The data safety card reads at a glance

• It was answering two different questions with one bar between them: how recently your log was copied somewhere other than this device, and how full this device is. They are separate facts now, each with its own bar and its own legend naming what green, amber and red mean.
• Backup freshness runs green under twelve hours, amber past twelve, red past thirty six or if nothing has ever been copied off. Twelve hours is one shooting day, so a copy from before the call today reads as ageing rather than safe.
• It also names which copies it is counting, whether that is the backup file, your Drive copies or the team sync, so you can see what the green is actually resting on.

All of it is in Spanish as well as English. Nothing here changes what you log, what your report looks like, or what your Silverstack and Drylab files contain: those are contracts with somebody else's software and this round adds nothing to either of them. The master CSV grows four optional columns at the very end, where a spreadsheet pointed at a column by position will never notice them.

shipped 20 August 2026

The whole data safety round, and star ratings. This build is the same app that went to everybody on 20 August, plus the Beta Lab identity bar, so you are on the public build and nothing is being held back from you right now. The next round of new features goes back behind the beta gate, which is what reopens the gap this programme exists for.

Backups are stronger and far easier to set up

• A new green Set up backups button on the Share tab. It looks at what your device can do and walks you through it, in the order that protects you most, and tells you what each option survives.
• Each option carries a tick that only turns green once a copy has really been made. If a save is cancelled, or your browser cannot tell us whether the file landed, it asks instead of assuming.
• Where your device cannot do something it says so and why. iPhone and iPad cannot keep writing to a file on their own, so Drive is the one that matters there.
• Backup files now carry the production name and the date. A device holding several jobs names the file for all of them.

You can see whether your work is safe

• A line showing how long ago a copy left this device, green when recent and red when not, plus a storage meter with the number of reference frames and roughly what they weigh.
• Earlier versions now lists the dated copies in your Google Drive beside the ones on your device, and every row says where it is kept.
• A new Deleted takes list. A deleted take is kept for 30 days with its reference frames and can be put back on its own. Batch deletes go there too, and putting one back warns you if another take has taken its place since.

Star ratings, and this is the one to try

• Rate a take one to five stars and the stars show on the log row as you scroll.
• A new Rating filter: five stars, four and up, three and up, or any rated take. Filter to the good ones, tap SELECT TAKES, and send exactly that set to your editor at wrap.
• A new Best rated first sort. Ratings are on by default and the demo day now carries four and five star takes.

Night shoots keep the right date

• Tell SmartLog to keep the shooting day until 2am, 4am, 6am or any hour you choose, so a take logged after midnight still files under the day the unit started.
• Fix dates already logged applies the same rule backwards over takes you already have. It shows you exactly which takes move and where to before it moves anything, and it can be undone.

Everywhere else

• Hold any control for a moment and SmartLog tells you what it does. On a phone, holding explains without pressing the button.
• A new Report a problem button sends us what your device and the app were doing. It shows you the whole report first and never includes your production name, scenes, notes, clip names or photographs. If you hit anything odd, this is the fastest way to tell us.
• Google Drive sync is lighter on battery and data. Your takes still go up seconds after you log them.
• Spanish throughout, including every new screen here.

Asked for by Amos Wont, who wanted his log to survive anything and his night shoots to stay on the right date.

shipped 19 August 2026

Asked for by Rafael Giuliano, a DIT in Brazil, whose third round of real Silverstack tests showed exactly which of our columns land and which never could. One round about one file: the CSV a DIT feeds Silverstack at wrap.

• The shot number can reach Silverstack now. Silverstack's clip-number import has no shot column, so a shot number cannot arrive through it whatever a file says. It travels two ways instead: in the new set report file below, and through Silverstack 9.3's newest importer, which reads it straight from the file SmartLog already writes and matches on timecode.
• A second file, shaped for matching by clip name. DRYLAB CSV sits beside the Silverstack CSV on the Share tab, on the Report tab and in the wrap pack, named for the Silverstack import menu item that reads it. It matches on the full clip name, so two rolls can never be confused, and it carries the shot number, the camera heading, the GPS pin and the shoot day number. Its first two lines are a heading that importer expects and skips past. The shape is new, so tell us how it lands on your machine.
• Two new columns on the Silverstack CSV. Take Origin, the per-take timestamp Silverstack's date matching prefers, which is what tells two rolls apart when one file carries the whole day; and Episode, for episodic jobs. Both appended at the end, so nothing that reads the file by column position moves.
• The import notes now cover a day with several rolls. The plain text file in the wrap pack says which match options to tick, when to export one file per roll from the Report tab instead, and which file carries the shot number.
• All of it in Spanish. The new buttons and messages.

shipped 19 August 2026

The camera database round, and a new set of icons. The cards calculator used to know nineteen cameras properly and ask you to type the rate for everything else. It now carries eighty seven bodies and five hundred and seventy five recording modes, every figure read off the manufacturer's own published material, and it says on screen where each number came from. You can still type your own rate on any camera in the list: that is an escape hatch now rather than the only way in.

• Every ARRI, from ARRI's own calculator. ALEXA 35, ALEXA 35 Xtreme, Mini LF, Mini, LF, 65, 265, AMIRA, and the Classic, XT and SXT that are still on rental shelves. ARRI publish the size of one recorded frame for every codec and sensor mode, so the rate is that frame times your frame rate, exactly, at any rate you shoot. Nothing is scaled and nothing is estimated. Two hundred and eighty six modes where there was one camera.
• The ALEXA 35 Xtreme is its own camera now. It was answering with the ordinary ALEXA 35's figures. It is a different body: ARRIRAW runs about three percent heavier, it records ARRICORE which the ALEXA 35 does not have at all, and it reaches ARRIRAW at rasters the 35 never offers. All fifty two of its modes are its own.
• The ALEXA 35's ProRes figures now come from ARRI rather than from Apple. They were Apple's reference rates scaled by pixel count, and ARRI's own numbers run thirteen to twenty eight percent higher, because ARRI's encoder is not Apple's reference encoder. A codec name matching is not a rate matching. If you have been budgeting cards for an ALEXA 35, the new figures are the ones to trust.
• The VENICE 2 8K, off Sony's own record times. Eleven scan modes, X-OCN XT, ST and LT, with Sony's published figure at each frame rate rather than one number stretched across all of them. Sony print the same modes on two different AXS cards, so every rate is worked out from one column and then checked against the other: one hundred and forty one independent checks, all passing.
• BURANO, all six codecs. X-OCN LT, XAVC H-I HQ and SQ, XAVC H-L, XAVC-I and XAVC-L across its seven scan modes. Sony publish a bitrate for 8K separately from the record-time chart everything here is derived from, and the two land within three percent of each other, which is what checks the whole chain.
• Canon EOS C50 and C70. The C50's complete matrix: Cinema RAW Light LT, ST and HQ across full frame, Super 35 and Super 16, plus XF-AVC, XF-AVC S and XF-HEVC S. Forty four modes on one camera. Canon publish record times as well as bitrates, and reproducing their minutes from the transcribed rate is what proves the transcription.
• RED, KOMODO-X, the V-RAPTORs and the DSMC2 bodies. RED publish a media write ceiling rather than a rate per mode, so that is what it says: the fastest the camera can write, with real footage running under it. The MINI-MAG cards are in the card list with their own write speeds, because a 240GB MINI-MAG caps lower than a 480GB one.
• Drones, action and 360, per camera module. A Mavic 3 Pro is three cameras with three different ceilings, and its Cine version adds ProRes at eighteen times the rate, so it is not one number for the aircraft. Mavic 4 Pro, Mavic 3 Pro and Pro Cine, Air 3S, Mini 4 Pro, Avata 2, Osmo Pocket 3, Insta360 X5 and Ace Pro 2.
• A Phantom explains itself instead of showing you nothing. Twenty five high-speed bodies that capture into memory and save to a card afterwards. They have no card rate to give, and saying so is the useful answer: minutes per card is the wrong question for that camera. A CineMag or CFast save speed is never treated as the capture rate.
• It tells you where every number came from. Under each answer, in plain words: straight from the manufacturer, worked out from their own published record time, or a ceiling for the whole camera that real footage runs under. The sources are listed underneath, naming the document and the exact row.
• A mode reads as the shot you are in. The sensor mode and the frame size sit with the codec, so 4.6K 3:2 Open Gate and 4K 16:9 are told apart on a body that records the same raster from two different sensor modes at rates sixteen percent apart.
• Type your own rate on any camera. Every body keeps Custom / manual data rate on the list, whether or not it has manufacturer figures. A published matrix never covers everything a camera can be set to.
• Cameras that look alike stay apart. A camera answers with another camera's figures only where the manufacturer's own documentation says the recording is identical, and the one case that qualifies says so in writing. Nine bodies that were quietly borrowing a similar-sounding sibling's rates now use their own: ALEXA Mini LF, VENICE, Mavic 3, Mavic 3 Pro Cine, Air 3, Avata, Neo 2, Flex4K-GS and Ace Pro.
• A new set of icons, drawn for this app. Eighty one of them, on one grid, across the tab bar, the take form, the report, sharing and Setup. The tab you are on now fills in solid rather than only changing colour, so the bar reads at a glance in daylight, and each icon takes the colour of whatever it sits in, so it is right in both themes.
• The search box on the log takes the room it needs. Search, then SLATE on the right, and Ghost Frame on its own full width row underneath with a fill of its own.
• Ghost Frame says when a frame has landed. Picking a reference frame, from the log or from the viewer, now confirms it.
• Removing a frame can be undone. Reference stills, lighting diagrams, card diagrams: the cross now leaves an UNDO and the picture really comes back. Those pixels only ever existed on that set on that day.
• Save is reachable from anywhere in the take form. SAVE TAKE, SAVE + NEW and SAVE + SAME are pinned to the foot of the sheet, the way the close button is pinned to the top, so you can be halfway up a long form and still save without scrolling. New setup, new roll and copy summary stay with the other actions.
• Bold is a bigger tab bar, not a smaller one. Arial Black measures twenty three percent wider than the system face, and the tab bar was shrinking its labels to fit. It fits at full size now.

shipped 18 August 2026

A round about the days when the log gets away from you. Every earlier round assumed you were keeping up. This one assumes the set is faster than the paperwork, that a clip sometimes exists with nothing written against it, and that two people wrote down the same take without knowing. All of it is off until you switch it on.

• Catch-up, for when the shooting is faster than the typing. A form with only the things that cannot be worked out afterwards on it: camera, card, clip, scene, take, timecode. Save writes a real take, in the log and on the report straight away, marked as still wanting detail, and opens the next one. Everything else can be filled in at lunch. A take that is missing detail is never a placeholder held somewhere else, because a placeholder is one more thing to lose.
• It suggests the setup, and it never applies it. When you come back to fill one in, SmartLog looks at the nearest finished take before it and the nearest one after it on the same camera. If they agree, it offers that setup. If only the one before it exists, it says so instead, because those are different claims. It will not offer anything across a body swap or a camera event, and nothing is written until you tap.
• Create the take for a clip that has none. The wrap check already spotted gaps in the clip numbering. Now it can fill one: the missing clip name is worked out from its neighbours keeping their padding and reel prefix, the takes either side are on screen, and the setup they agree on is offered. It lands in the day between its neighbours rather than at the end, and the history says it was recovered from a missing clip.
• The same take on two cameras, put back together. On a shared job two people write down one take separately. SmartLog offers the pairs: same day, same scene and slate, same take number, different cameras, timecode within a second. It never asks on a take number alone, because every camera on earth shoots a take 3. Joining them makes one row with a tab per camera, and each camera keeps its own clip, card, lens, stop and notes. It is reversible, and a pair you say is not a match is never offered again.
• A value that moves during the take. A zoom that starts at 50 and ends at 135, a focus pull from 2.4 to 8.6 metres, an iris ramp from T2.8 to T4. Tap +END on the field and record both. It prints as 50 > 135mm on the report and travels in the CSV split into its start and its end as well as whole. A prime is never offered the control, and a take with one value behaves exactly as it always has.
• Which way the camera was pointing. A heading in degrees with its compass point, 247° WSW, sitting with the lens height, the tilt and the dutch. Type it, or tap measure and use the phone's compass. It asks for the compass only when you tap, it says when a reading is relative rather than true north, and it is on the continuity card.
• Ghost Frame. Search the whole job for any reference frame, pull it up, and ghost it over the live camera until the shot lines back up. Fade between them, drag a wipe across the join with your finger, or flicker between the two, which is the fastest way to catch a small difference: an edge that does not match jumps as the divider crosses it. Capture what you have lined up and it is added to the take, and the reference you matched against is never touched. If the camera is not available the reference is still there to look at. It has its own door on the Log tab, in Setup and beside the reference stills, because a tool you can only reach from the right take is not a tool.
• Report profiles. One day, four people who each want a different sheet of paper. Full, DIT, VFX, production, or your own saved set of fields in your own order. It changes only what prints. No take is altered, nothing is deleted, and the take form keeps every field regardless, because hiding the lens from a printed report must never hide it from the person typing it.
• Stars, where a circle is too blunt. One to five on a take, for documentary, interviews, live events and anything unscripted where a whole afternoon is usable and somebody still has to say which three minutes were the good ones. Completely independent of the circle: neither implies the other. Off unless you turn it on.
• Saved views. The three questions you ask every day, saved with a name: A camera on the current card, everything tagged VFX, the four star and better takes. It stores the filters, the search, the grouping and the sort, and one tap puts them all back.
• Search that understands what you are asking. Type cam:A rating:4+ or scene:42B tag:VFX or needs:detail and the search box turns them into filters you can see and remove one at a time. Anything it does not recognise stays ordinary text and behaves exactly as it always did, so a colon in a note breaks nothing.
• Link a take to its sound. A sound roll and a sound file on the take, off unless you want them. The roll carries forward the way the camera roll does; the file never does, because it names one recording. An MOS take is never asked for a file.
• What this production calls finished. Different from the wrap check, which finds things that are wrong. This is what YOUR job needs on a take before it is done: a commercial wants a clip number and a lens, a VFX heavy feature wants the lens serial, the geometry, the heading and a reference still. Presets for basic, DIT and VFX, or pick the fields yourself. A take says READY or names what is outstanding, and it never stops you saving.
• Switches instead of tick boxes. Everything in this round that can be turned on has a real toggle sitting beside its own name, in its own box with the explanation underneath, and it changes colour when it is on.
• The Setup tab always opens on the main menu. Setup is nine sections behind one index, and the tab is the way in, so it opens the front door every time instead of leaving you where you last were.
• All of it in Spanish. Every screen in this round.
• A camera event can land on the editor's timeline. An event carries a wall clock rather than a timecode, so it is placed only where that can honestly become a position on the day: its derived time has to fall inside the span the day's own takes occupy. On a time-of-day job it does, and the event becomes a marker in its own colour, never the green or red that mean circled and false to an editor. On a record-run job it does not, and it is left out rather than dropped at a frame nobody measured.
• The report legend explains what is on the page. It only ever said circled and struck, so a report carrying a false roll or a take marked AFS printed two things it never explained to somebody holding paper. Each term now earns its place from the data, so a day without them prints exactly the legend it always did.
• Setup search finds all of it, including the parts that are not in Setup. Type the words you would actually say rather than our names for things: fell behind, too fast, missing clip, logged twice, zoom, compass, line it up, vfx report, stars, saved view, sound file, what is missing. A search of several words now matches on any word in it, so a phrase that starts with a short word finds an answer instead of nothing.

shipped 18 August 2026

Asked for by Mateo Alvarez, a 1st AC in Mexico, Priya Nair, a DIT in India, and Lukas Schneider, a 2nd AC in Germany. The app already recorded a take very well. This round is about the rest of the day: what changed outside a take, which camera was on which body, what the setup was when you have to come back to it, and what the next person needs to know when they pick the camera up.

• A camera event is a row of its own. A rejam, a restart, a card error, an overheat, a tech hold: the things that happen between takes and have no business wearing a scene and a take number. It sits in the day at the time it happened, it is never counted as a take, and it never takes a clip number. It goes on the report and in the CSV so the day reads back complete.
• The camera body is recorded on the take, not looked up later. Swap a body at three in the afternoon, type the new serial into Setup, and everything you shot that morning still says which camera it was actually on. Every report, every CSV and the Silverstack file keep the body the take was shot on. A take logged before this build has no body recorded and says so rather than being given one.
• Body swap, as one deliberate act. It shows you the body you are on, takes the replacement and its serial, asks why, and writes the swap into the day as an event carrying both serials. Setup gained a body serial, because two ALEXA 35s are the same words and different cameras.
• TC check, and a rejam that remembers the drift. Read the camera's own timecode display, type it in, and SmartLog tells you how far apart you are in frames. Log the check or rejam there and then. A rejam records the drift it was correcting, which is the part an assistant editor needs: rejammed at 14:46 after minus three frames tells them which clips to distrust. Crossing midnight is handled, and it never moves your own clock.
• Continuity reference takes, which are not the circle. The circle is the director's opinion. The reference is the setup to reproduce when you come back to this scene next Tuesday, and on a day where the best performance was the take where the lens got bumped they are different takes. One per setup per camera, marked REF on the row and on the report.
• The continuity card. Everything a setup needs on one screen, ready to copy or share: body and serial, lens and its serial, focal length, stop, EI, shutter, filtration, LUT, distance, lens height, tilt, dutch, the location pin and the reference still. Empty values are left out. It reads the body from the take, so a card opened six weeks later names the camera you actually shot on.
• Match continuity. Put what you have now beside the reference and see exactly what differs, then put back only the groups you choose: lens and focal, exposure and colour, recording mode, camera position. It never touches the roll, the clip, the timecode, the take number, your notes or the marks, because those belong to this take.
• Link a take to another take. Pickup of, continuation of, clean plate for, VFX plate for, alt of. A tag says what a take is; a link says which take it belongs to, which is the half that survives to the edit. The take it points at shows the link coming back the other way. It changes no numbering and adds no tags: those stay yours.
• Coverage, by scene. Read off the takes you have logged: how many, which cameras, how many circled, the focal lengths, the reference and any plates. It counts a slate shot on several cameras once. The notes underneath are context and not faults, because a scene you are still shooting has no circled take yet.
• What changed on this take. Every committed edit to a saved take, with what it was and what it became. Correct an ISO at wrap and there is a line saying so. Undo adds its own line rather than quietly removing one, because a history you can delete from is not a history.
• The day timeline, and a camera handoff you can send. Takes, false rolls, camera events, card changes, body swaps and rejams in one list in the order they happened, filtered to a camera or to just the issues. Copy camera handoff writes the state of every camera as plain text: where each one is on its card, what body and glass it is on, when its timecode was last checked and what is outstanding.
• Re-card a run of takes. The card was wrong for forty takes. Select them, choose the new card, and every row gets its own clip number counted in shooting order, with the whole list shown before anything is written. A name already used on that camera stops it. Undo puts every roll and clip back.
• Tap to clear a field. A small cross inside any field that holds something. It only appears when there is something to clear, and it clears the way typing does, so the sliders, the chips and the take number all keep up. Placeholder text is lighter than real text now, so an empty form reads as empty.
• This device is on camera C. Tell a phone which camera it is on and new takes open on that letter with the log filtered to it. It is a fact about the phone, so it never travels to anybody else's device on a shared job.
• Notes for the Silverstack import, in the wrap pack. A short plain text file beside the CSV saying which match options to tick and why, the two settings on the Silverstack side that quietly drop your metadata, and the columns that need a renamed custom field first.
• Copy for the production report. The camera department's figures for the day as one plain block, in the order the office asks for them.
• All of it in Spanish. Every screen in this round, and the Beta Lab panel with it.

shipped 18 August 2026

Asked for by Rafael Giuliano, a DIT in Brazil, who did the thing nobody had done before: he exported his own Silverstack library beside our CSV of the same roll and sent both, so the two could be read line by line. All 26 clips matched. Scene, shot, take, the circle, the notes, ISO, colour temperature and the filters all landed exactly. Four fields arrived empty, and this round is those four fields.

• The focal length goes out on its own. A lens chip stores what reads well on a log row, 32mm followed by the name of the set, and that whole line was going into the one lens field the importer offers. The export now takes it apart on the way out: the focal length as its own value, so a clip in the library can say 32mm in the field that means focal length. What the app shows you on screen has not changed at all.
• So does the glass. The lens model travels as its own value too, Cooke S7/i Full Frame or whatever you have named your set. A lens you typed yourself travels exactly as you typed it: a take logged on a 135mm with a doubler still says so at the far end, because a doubler changes the focal length and the stop and that is the most important thing on the row.
• Lens serial numbers. If a take was shot on a lens in your lens register, that lens's serial number now rides out with the take. The register already knew it. The export was not asking.
• Focus distance and the shoot day number travel as well, each in its own column.
• Two settings on the Silverstack side that are worth knowing. Set the import to overwrite rather than to fill empty fields only: a camera that writes Unknown into the lens field has already filled it, so an insert-if-empty import will leave your value out. And several of these arrive as custom fields, which have to be renamed in Silverstack preferences to Description, Lens Height, Lens Type, LUT and Aspect Ratio before they can land.
• Clip number and camera is the pairing to trust. Reading a real day back showed our times sitting up to twenty minutes away from the camera's own timecode, because what travels is the moment the take was saved on the phone rather than the moment the camera rolled. Match on clip number and camera and leave timecode and creation date unticked.
• The Beta Lab panel now tells the truth about itself. It used to list every experimental control under one line saying none of it was in the public app. Six of the eleven had an ancestor there already: a screen wake lock on the slate board, Same again, roll stepping that resets the clip, shoot day counting, the rolling state, and Smartfill. Each entry now says what it reworks, or says nothing when it really is new. A tester reporting a bug needs to know which half they are looking at.

shipped 18 August 2026

Asked for by Beng Han, a 2nd AC in Malaysia. Two things that keep the card and the report telling the same story: the clip that was never a take, and the take that follows a false start.

• A false roll is a row of its own. The camera rolled and nobody shot a take: a bumped button, a battery test, a roll before anyone slated. It goes on the report with its camera, roll and clip number, and it is never counted as a take. A loader offloading 42 clips against 39 takes can now read in one line why the numbers differ, instead of hunting for three takes that were never shot. It carries no scene and no take number, because it never had either.
• The clip after a false roll steps past it. The card does not care that it was not a take. Log a false roll on A003C004 and the next take comes up A003C005, which is what the camera itself will name the file. Same again counts from the card too, so a take and a false roll can never end up claiming one clip number.
• AFS, for the take after a false start. Tap AFS on the take form and it prints as 4 AFS on the report and rides the CSV, the Silverstack file and the marker files. It is the note an assistant editor needs most: AFS classically means the camera never cut, so the clip holds sticks, a blown first second, a reset and a second clap, and the second clap is the sync point. The form offers it once, when the take before it on that camera is marked false, and the tap stays yours, because a false take is not always a false start.
• After a false take: burn the number, or reuse it. Some crews call the next one take 4 and write 4 AFS on the slate. Others re-slate it as another take 3 and let the circle say which one counts. Setup now asks which your job does, and the take form suggests the number your way. It only ever changes what is suggested.
• Filter the log to false rolls. A FALSE ROLL chip appears beside GOOD and FALSE as soon as the day holds one, so the question a DIT actually asks, which files on this card are not takes, is one tap. It is not offered on a day that has none.
• Both demos carry one. The demo day and the documentary in the demo productions each have a false roll in them, so you can see what the row looks like, and watch the next clip number step past it, without logging one yourself.

shipped 17 August 2026

A round about the taps you make a hundred times a day, and about not losing anything. The header now carries a gold BETA LAB bar with the build number on it, so you can always tell which build is on the phone in your hand.

• The take you were typing is not lost. If the browser reloads, the phone kills the tab, or the app is closed with a take half filled in, SmartLog offers it back the next time you open it. It tells you which take and how long ago, and waits: nothing is put into your log until you say so, and nothing is saved until you press save as usual.
• Save and open the next take, in one tap. SAVE + NEW writes the take and opens the next one already filled in the way Smartfill always fills it, with the clip counted on. SAVE + SAME saves and repeats the take for that camera. If a save does not go through for any reason the next form does not open, so a take can never be lost behind another one.
• A new card is one tap. NEW ROLL / CARD shows you what it is about to do, A004 to A005 with the next clip at A005C001, and starts it when you agree. It is per camera: putting A onto a new card does not touch what B is on. A card name it cannot work out is left for you to type rather than guessed at.
• The next setup is one tap. NEW SETUP moves the slate on and puts the take back to 1: scene 42A becomes 42B in the US convention, slate 17 becomes 18 in the UK one. The camera settings stay exactly where they are, because the setup changed and the camera did not. It is proposed into the form so you can correct it before it becomes a row.
• Where you are, without leaving the take. A line at the top of the form reads the day back to you: SCENE 42A, 5 takes, 1 circled, A and B cam, last 50mm. It counts slates rather than rows, so a take shot on two cameras counts once. It reads the slate number instead of the scene on a UK job.
• The last few things you typed, on any field. A small RECENT button on eighteen fields gives you what you actually put in that box earlier: the four distances this scene keeps coming back to, the filter stack that went on at lunch. Technical values are per camera, because B camera's stop is no guide to A's. Nothing to set up and nothing to maintain: it reads your own log.
• Send one take to somebody without making a PDF. COPY SUMMARY puts the take on the clipboard as plain readable text, scene, take, roll, clip, lens, stop, EI, filtration, LUT, notes and timecode, leaving out anything the take has not got. On a phone it offers the share sheet. A take shot on several cameras lists the others underneath with what differed.
• The screen stays awake while you are rolling. Off, while a take is rolling, or the whole time SmartLog is in front of you. It defaults to while rolling, which is the window where a screen going dark actually costs you something, and it does not sit there draining the battery for the rest of the day.
• Fix a take without opening the whole form. Press and hold a take in the log for QUICK EDIT: take number, clip, lens, focal length, stop, ISO, filters, internal ND, LUT, tags, notes and the circle or false mark. It saves through exactly the same path as a full edit, so the wrap check, the report, the exports and team sync all see it the same way, and UNDO puts it back.
• How long this take has been running. A rolling take counts up on its row and at the top of the form, and settles to its final duration after CUT. It is honest about what it cannot know: a timecode it cannot read shows nothing at all rather than a number nobody measured. Crossing midnight is handled.
• Start the next shoot day properly. START NEXT SHOOT DAY shows you the day you are on and the day you are going to, lets you change the date because shoots skip days, and asks whether to start every camera on a fresh card. Every earlier day stays in the log with its own report. Card numbering is never reset unless you ask for it: a card that has been shot cannot be shot again.
• Everything in this round is listed in the app. Tap the build number in the gold bar for the Beta Lab panel: what is experimental in this build, the screen wake setting, the next shoot day wizard, and a feedback button that fills in your build number and device for you.

shipped 17 August 2026

A round about speed. Every one of these is a shortcut for something you were already doing by hand, twenty times a day, on a set that does not stop to wait.

• Quick notes, for the note you write twenty times a day. A strip of one-tap phrases under the notes field: FOCUS, BOOM, CAM BUMP, FLARE, PERF, RESET, NG. Tapping one adds its phrase without touching what you already typed, and tapping it again takes it back off. Edit the list for your own job, and give a chip a short code so typing fb and saving gives you Focus buzz.
• Recent setups. A new take opens holding the last few setups this camera actually used: 50mm T2.8, 32mm T2 ND.6. One tap puts a whole setup back. It is for a day that goes wide, close-up, wide, close-up, where the setup you want is two takes ago rather than one. Per camera, so A camera history never lands on B.
• What changed. One line at the top of every take saying how many things are different from the last take on that camera. Tap it and it lists them: lens 35mm to 50mm, stop T2 to T2.8, internal ND .6 to 1.2. The fastest way to catch a value that carried forward when it should not have. Writing 50 in one take and 50mm in the next is not a change.
• The wrap check runs while you log, not only at wrap. The same checks, running as you go. A take missing something this production asked for wears a quiet amber flag on its row; two takes sharing a clip number go red. It never stops you saving a take, because a report is a record of what happened. The Report tab button carries the count for the day you have picked and turns green with a tick when the day is clean. Switch it off in Setup if you would rather not see it.
• Edit several takes at once. Tap SELECT TAKES, pick as many as you like across both cameras, then set one field on all of them, add or remove a tag, circle them, mark them false or delete them. For the moment you realise the LUT changed at take 3 and six takes are wrong. Clip numbers, take numbers and timecode are deliberately not on the list: each of those belongs to one take.
• Undo, on the things that matter. Deleting a take, circling one, marking one false, tagging a batch or changing a batch all leave an UNDO in the toast. It puts back exactly what was there before, not the opposite of what you did, which matters when the takes you changed did not all start the same. Undoing a deleted take brings its reference stills and diagrams back too.
• Notes stamped with the timecode. On a long take, NOTE NOW records the clock at the instant you tap it and takes the note afterwards, so the stamp is honest even if the typing is not. For interviews, concerts, performance, anything that runs for minutes. They print under their take on the report, ride in the CSV, and land on a Resolve, Premiere or Final Cut timeline as markers at their own timecode. The quick note chips work here too.
• More than one clip on a take. A take really can make two files: the camera stops and restarts, or a card fills mid-take. The small plus beside the clip field adds another. The next take counts on from the LAST clip so the numbering stays right, and the wrap check looks at every clip when it hunts for duplicates. A take with one clip behaves exactly as it always did.
• Recording mode, on the take. A camera setup says what the body is usually doing. The recording mode on a take says what it was doing on THAT take, which is the only version that survives a high-speed insert at four in the afternoon. List the modes your job shoots in Setup and they become one-tap chips that carry forward like any other setup value.
• Back to the camera defaults, in one tap. Set what normal looks like for each camera: frame rate, shutter, ISO, LUT, recording mode. After a high-speed insert the take form offers RESET TO CAMERA DEFAULTS and shows you exactly what it will change before it changes it. It never touches the scene, the take, the clip, the timecode, the lens or the filtration.
• The day, counted. The Report tab now counts your day: takes, setups, how much was recorded, circled and false takes, pick-ups, clips and cards per camera, the lenses and focal lengths used, the highest frame rate, MOS, tail slates and every tag. A take that made two clips is still one take. Print it as a page at the front of the report if you want it.
• One download with the whole wrap in it. DOWNLOAD WRAP PACK builds a single zip holding the PDF report, the master CSV, the Silverstack CSV and the Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut marker files, with your reference stills and lighting diagrams as options. Built on your own device, named after the production and the day, nothing uploaded anywhere.
• Who the report goes to. Save the addresses your report always goes to and EMAIL REPORT opens with them already in the To line and a subject naming the production, the episode and the day. No address book is read and we send nothing: your own mail app does the sending and you see the message before it goes.
• How many shoot days, worked out for you. Put in the date the shoot starts, the date it finishes and how many days a week you are shooting, and the shoot days count themselves. Type your own total over it and yours wins from then on, which is what you want the week the schedule changes. Clearing the box hands it back to the dates. The day number itself is still counted off the days you have actually logged, never off the calendar, so a week off never moves it.
• Keyboard shortcuts. On an iPad with a keyboard or a laptop: N new take, S same again, C circle, F false, E edit, slash to search, space to CUT a rolling take, 1 to 5 for the tabs, Cmd or Ctrl and Enter to save, Escape to close. Press question mark for the list. None of them fire while you are typing in a field.
• And all of it is findable. Setup answers for the whole app: search the word you would actually say, including the word for the old way of doing something, and it takes you to the thing. Every one of these is written up in the in-app guide as well, in English and in Spanish.

shipped 17 August 2026

• Wrap check, before you send the report. Tap WRAP CHECK on the Report tab and SmartLog reads the whole day back to you: takes with no clip number, a zoom with no focal length, a TC out that lands before its TC in, two takes claiming one clip, gaps in the clip numbering, a take still rolling. Errors first, then things worth a look, then notes. Tap any line to open the take it is about. It only ever reads the day: nothing it finds can change a take.
• The focal length a zoom was actually set to. A prime fills its own focal length in the moment you pick it, so a prime day costs no extra taps. A zoom cannot be guessed at, so the chips become that zoom's own barrel marks and the field waits for you. A take logged on a 24-290 now says which end of it you were on.
• The LUT rides on the take. Setup still holds the show LUT and every new take inherits it. Change it once for the night exterior and it carries forward from there, so the report says what each take was actually monitored through.
• Tags on a take. PU, VFX, PLATE, CLEAN PLATE, ELEMENT, REF, 2ND STICKS, or your own. Tap to stack them the way filters stack. They deliberately never carry to the next take, because a pick-up is one take and not a policy.
• Head, tail or no slate. Its own control beside Sound. A tail-slated take reads TAILS on the log row and on the report, and the column only appears on a day that actually has one, so nothing changes on paper for a job that head slates everything.
• Match this take. Open any take from earlier in the job and tap MATCH THIS TAKE: a new take opens already holding that setup's lens, focal length, stop, ISO, shutter, internal ND, filters, colour temperature, tint, subject, distance, rig and LUT. The take number, clip, timecode, notes and marks all stay fresh. Same again repeats the last take on a camera; this repeats any take in the log.
• Episodic jobs. Series, season, episode, unit, block and production number, every one of them optional and tucked behind a disclosure in Setup so a commercial never sees them. Fill them in and they print in the report header and travel in the CSV.
• The app explains itself. How SmartLog works has grown two sections: what each take records, and finishing the day. Setup’s search now answers for the whole app, so typing wrap, wrap day, tails, focal length or match this take finds the passage that explains it and the tab it lives on. A search that matches a whole word now beats one that merely matches inside a longer word, so "tails" stops returning lens serials and details. In English and in Spanish.