What logging is, and why you would want logs

Logging is the part of post-production that happens before anyone cuts anything: watching the footage and writing down what is actually in it — what each clip covers, who says what, where the good bits are, which takes are usable. The result is a log: a searchable map of your rushes.

Editors have always done it. It is also the first thing to get skipped, because doing it by hand means watching everything in real time. Five hours of interviews is five hours of watching before the edit starts.

Eddie logs your footage automatically as part of import, so the map exists whether or not you were ever going to make one.

Why you would want a log

You cannot cut what you cannot find. On a long shoot, the difference between a good cut and a great one is usually a moment somebody remembered. A log turns "I think she said something about her father in the second hour" into a timestamp.

It is the cheapest way to decide what the piece is. Reading an outline of six interviews takes minutes. Watching them takes a day. Most structural decisions — which story you are telling, who carries it, what gets cut — are easier to make from the log than from the footage.

Somebody else can work from it. A producer choosing soundbites, a client approving direction, an assistant pulling selects, a writer drafting narration: none of them need the media, and all of them need to know what is in it.

It survives the project. Footage gets archived. A log stays readable, and it is what makes the archive searchable a year later.

What Eddie logs

A-roll — an interview outline. One entry per interview, with a title, a summary and timestamped sections, so you can see the shape of a conversation without scrubbing it.

B-roll — a shot log. Each clip gets a description of what is on screen, its shot type, the themes it touches, and the sections of it that are actually usable, so a cutaway can be chosen on content rather than on filename.

Both sit on top of the transcript, so everything spoken is searchable too — see Transcripts and speakers.

Where to find it

Open a project before you have generated an edit and you will see an Interview Logs panel. Once you start an edit, that panel is replaced by the edit view — the logs are still there, they are just no longer what the screen is for.

You can take the whole log out of Eddie as an NLE timeline, a CSV, a Word document, or straight into Google Drive: see Download interview and B-roll logs.

Do I have to ask for it?

No. Logging happens when your footage is imported, so there is no separate step and no separate charge — the import is metered as usual and the log comes with it. See How credits and billing work.

If you would rather go straight to a cut, you can: the log is there underneath either way, and Eddie uses it when you ask for an edit. See Make your first AI edit.