Why a cinematographer built a logging tool
A lot of my work is sports, including nearly three seasons as the team photographer for UCF Athletics, and the part of that job nobody sees starts after the cards come out of the cameras. A half of football fills several cards, and before anyone can cut it, somebody has to name every clip, describe what happens in it and attach the right players, which is slow work that ends up typed into a spreadsheet of shot notes.
So I built ClipLogger to take the first pass at that logging. You set up a palette for the project with the plays and the roster, ClipLogger reads selected frames from each clip and suggests values from that palette, and you keep or correct each suggestion instead of typing it from scratch, so the crew spends its energy on the edit.
I also wanted the logging to outlast the app that did it, because the tools that tag footage for you keep most of what they find on their own platform, and once you stop paying, the work your team did sits behind a login. ClipLogger writes every confirmed tag into the file name and into an open .logger.json sidecar and XMP beside the clip, so Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut and Avid can read it, and the files stay readable if you never open ClipLogger again.
The version that runs on your Mac is free and needs no account, and Rush, the paid cloud service, is there for the days you need a whole folder logged in parallel before the edit starts.
Leland Dutcher, developer of ClipLogger
