ClipSubject
A known person, item, or place that can be associated with clips in a project. One record can hold different evidence, including face examples, appearance, and roster information. You review and name the association. Duplicate records and ambiguous appearances can still occur, so use the review and merge workflow rather than assuming identity is always resolved automatically.
Cast
The set of subjects a project owns. Your roster seeds it, you add to it by marking examples, and the AI links clips against it. The cast lives inside the project document, so it travels wherever the project does.
Project
The organizing unit. A project owns three things: a palette snapshot (its own copy of your field schema), a subject cast, and a brief (what the deliverable is, plus an optional AI digest). Membership is a list of references; adding a clip to a project never moves or copies the file. Structured fields and AI logging require an active project because they need a schema and a cast to mean anything.
Palette (Log Selector profile)
Your metadata schema: the fields you log, their types and options, plain-language definitions, keyboard bindings, lookup tables, and the project's two naming templates (display name and written file name). One palette is live in both Logging and Browse. Your library keeps reusable palette templates; attaching one to a project copies it, so project edits never change the template.
Field
One palette entry with a label, type, and intended target. Native values such as rating differ from custom structured fields. Types include single-select, multi-select, text, subject, and AI Description. A definition and controlled options help the team log consistently; export compatibility depends on the receiving format.
Facet
A field or property you can use to narrow the current view, such as subject, rating, shot size or frame rate. The picker shows available values from the indexed media in your current folder or project. Add filters together to drill down to the shot you need.
Sidecar (.logger.json)
A portable JSON record associated with a media file. Its actual contents depend on completed work, schema, and enabled output settings. Preserve it beside the corresponding media, but also keep project and catalog data where portable publication is incomplete. Another application needs to understand or map the schema to consume its fields.
content_key
An internal media-matching key used by the catalog. It is not a user-facing guarantee that a name or partial content match proves ownership of a file. Keep the original media, the associated metadata, and project records together when backing up. Do not use an internal identifier as permission to delete or overwrite a file.
Reel
The watch mode. Strips layout gives each clip a filmstrip row you can hover-peek; String-Out lays the whole filtered set end to end. Use it to watch a day in order and cull as you go.
String-out
The entire filtered set laid out as one continuous strip you scrub like a single timeline, with a playhead and bulk-action rails. When the order tells the story, export it as an FCPXML sequence for your NLE.
Code Replace layer
A whole modifier layer of your keyboard turned into a code-entry surface: hold the modifier, type a code, and the bound lookup table resolves it into the field with an autocomplete HUD as you type. Holding shift and typing "72" to log an athlete by jersey number is this feature.
Lookup table
Any imported code-to-value sheet: a roster, location codes, shot codes, crew, SKUs. Parsed from CSV or TSV, bound to fields or code layers, searchable by code, name, or detail column. You can join several columns into the stored value and replace a table's contents in place later without breaking the bindings that point at it.
Roster
The canonical lookup table: jersey number, name, position. Importing one does two jobs at once: it becomes the code-replace source for typing numbers, and it seeds the project's cast with one person-subject per row, number bound, before any footage is analysed.
Anchor
A visual example you give ClipLogger for a person, item or place. Draw a box around the subject in a frame and connect it to the right record—for example, an athlete, a plate of shrimp scampi or a Tajín-rim margarita. Confirm useful examples and reject misleading ones to improve later matches.
Marquee
A box you draw around a person, item or place in a frame. Link the crop to a named subject to show ClipLogger the example you mean, then review the matches it suggests.
Rush
ClipLogger’s hosted batch reasoning service. It requires eligible account access and credits. Results return to the logging review workflow with the route recorded. Some other account features and the Your API route also have entitlements; Rush is not the only reason sign-in can matter.
Credit
The unit used to reserve and settle eligible Rush work. Inspect the current submission disclosure for the actual batch requirement and balance. Failed, cancelled, undispatched, and already-processed work can settle differently; use the server result rather than assuming a cancelled window means a full refund.
Engine
The service or model that handles a reasoning job. Local runs on this Mac or at the endpoint you configure. Your API uses your selected cloud provider and key. Rush uses ClipLogger’s hosted service. Check the selected route before starting a batch: an endpoint on another computer receives the selected frames and enabled context needed for that job.
Provenance
The stored record of which engine produced a value: local, your own server, your API key, or Rush, recorded at the moment it ran. The clip's provenance badge displays it, and a value from before provenance tracking says "provenance unrecorded" rather than guessing.
Pending vs Confirmed
Pending is a proposed value or subject association awaiting a decision. Confirmed records a reviewed logging decision. Proposals, evidence, and attempt history can be persisted, so pending does not mean that nothing has been written anywhere. Check the active field, review surface, and export format to understand which values are used downstream.
Grounding (bounding box)
A region attached to evidence: face groups store per-frame boxes, and clip reasoning can return per-region boxes that tie what the model said to where it saw it. Paused playback shows the overlay. Boxes are evidence for your confirm decision, never autonomous tags.
Bin and smart bin
Query views inside a project, not folders that hold files. A manual bin is a curated list you drag clips into; a smart bin is a saved search (the exact search-box grammar) that evaluates live on each machine, plus any clips you pin in or exclude. Bins nest, and deleting one never touches a file.
Vault
The catalog for a storage location, containing the index and related library records. A local external volume can carry its catalog in <volume>/.cliplogger/. Startup-disk, network-share, and multi-root indexes can instead live in ~/Library/Caches/ClipLogger/vault-dbs/ on the Mac. Do not assume the catalog travels with every drive or that it can always be recreated without losing catalog-only work. Back up the relevant catalogs as well as the media and portable metadata.
Brief and digest
The brief is a project's statement of intent: deliverable type, target duration, aspect, tone notes, must-includes, exclusions. The AI digest is an optional model-written overview of the whole project stored on the brief; once it exists it primes later AI runs so clip forty benefits from what the project already established.
Prepare
The batch verb for AI logging: run the configured engine over the selected or browsed set and stage suggestions for review. You can stop a run (finished clips keep their results) and retry just the failures.
Re-reason
A new reasoning attempt for a clip. Use it when the evidence, field definitions, or intended engine have changed, then inspect the new result. It is a scoped analysis action rather than a general reset of the library.
Virtual clip (sub-clip)
A range of a source clip with its own browse and analysis context. Creating the virtual record does not require a new camera original. Keep the parent media available and validate the range in exports. Portability depends on the written schema and the receiving application.
Marker and segment
A marker describes a point in a clip. A segment describes an in-to-out range. Use the intended output format and check timing in the receiving NLE, particularly when source and timeline timecodes differ. Preserve the source context along with the note.
Evidence
The material the model reads alongside your palette: sampled frames (sharpness-aware), the transcript, on-screen text from OCR, detected framing and motion, and the clip's filename and folder names. Each text leg has a switch in AI settings, and a leg that is off is omitted from the prompt entirely.