The shooting checklist
What gets forgotten and costs an hour on set: cards, batteries, extension leads, permits, call sheet.
This is not a list of everything that exists. It is a list of the things that actually get forgotten — cheap, unglamorous items that stop a shooting day or cost an hour of it. 36 of them, from a working studio's own bad mornings.
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Camera
Almost everything here is cheap and impossible to buy at seven in the morning.
Sound
The department that gets cut first and cannot be fixed afterwards.
Light and power
The list that decides whether you are shooting at nine or still rigging at eleven.
Location and paperwork
The items on this list are the ones that stop a day entirely, rather than slowing it down.
Before you wrap
Five minutes here saves a return trip. Every item is something that cannot be obtained later.
The three that cost the most
Extension leads. Every shoot is short of them, and no location has ever had enough sockets where the lamps need to be. They are the cheapest item in this whole list and the one that most often decides whether you start on time.
Room tone. One minute on location, impossible to obtain afterwards, and missed on almost every edit where it was skipped. It is the clearest example of something that costs nothing on the day and cannot be bought back at any price.
The second copy. A single copy of a shooting day is not a backup. Drives fail, cards fail, and they do it on the days that were hard to arrange. Two copies before anyone leaves — work out how much space that actually needs before you buy the drive, not on the evening.
Frequently asked
What is most often forgotten on a shoot?
Extension leads and adapters. Not the camera, not the lenses — the boring items nobody is proud of owning. After those: the charger (as opposed to the batteries), the tripod plate that stayed screwed to the other camera, and room tone. Every one of them is cheap, and every one of them costs an hour.
Why format cards in the camera rather than on a computer?
Because the camera writes the file structure it expects to find. A card formatted by a computer can be accepted and then behave unpredictably — dropped frames, files that will not close cleanly, a directory the camera refuses. It takes ten seconds in the camera and it removes a whole class of problem.
What is room tone and why does the checklist insist on it?
Thirty seconds to a minute of the location with nobody speaking. The editor uses it to fill gaps, smooth joins and cover replaced lines. Every room's silence is different, so it cannot be borrowed from elsewhere and cannot be manufactured. It costs one minute on the day and it is the single most regretted omission in post-production.
Why does it say verify the cards, not copy them?
Because a copy can complete and still be wrong. Verifying re-reads what was written and compares it to the source, usually by checksum, and it is the only thing that actually proves the day is safe. Most offload tools do it if you switch it on — and the moment to discover a bad card is while you are still standing on the location.
Is one copy on a drive enough for the night?
No. One copy of a shooting day is not a backup, it is a single point of failure carrying an entire crew's work. Two copies on two different drives, before anybody leaves. The cards themselves count as one of the two only until they are reformatted — which is usually the next morning.