What a clean turnover looks like

The turnover is the handover from editorial to VFX: the locked cut, the shot list, exact frame ranges, and the media we'll build on. Series work runs on them. On shows like The Chosen and Testament, editorial locks an episode, hands over its shots, and the post clock starts.

A clean turnover takes a day to check and load, and artists start on Monday. A messy one starts with detective work. Which clip did this plate come from. Where does shot 040 actually start. Why is the folder called one thing and the spreadsheet another. None of that is creative work, all of it takes time, and the schedule pays for every hour. Messy turnovers are where post schedules quietly die.

The fix is not heroics, it's a property: everything in the turnover should agree with everything else. The edit list knows where each shot sits in the cut. Clip names and source timecode know where the frames came from. The plates carry the pixels. Each piece knows something the others don't, so when they can be checked against each other, mistakes surface in minutes. When they can't, mistakes surface in comp, weeks later, at full price.

Why we go on about timecode

Every camera clip carries source timecode, a running clock stamped into every frame. Think of it as each frame's street address. An EDL or XML, the file your editing system exports, records which addresses made the cut: this shot is clip A057C004, from 14:22:31:05 to 14:22:35:17. With that, we pull the exact frames from the camera originals and prove we're working on the same shot your editor is looking at.

The common failure is the flattened export: a plate rendered out of the timeline with its history stripped. Timecode zeroed, clip name gone, sometimes a grade or a resize baked in. The pixels look perfect, and there is no longer any way to prove which frames they are. We can match them to the cut by eye, and sometimes we have to, but eye-matching is slow and it's the one method that can't prove itself right. That's the week of detective work.

It's also why one frame matters. A one-frame slip is invisible. Frame 1044 looks almost exactly like frame 1045, so nothing complains at handover. But comp is frame-accurate work. Roto, tracking, paint and cleanup are all locked to frame numbers, so a plate that's one frame out means every frame of finished work lands in the wrong place, and the shot won't join back into your cut. You find out late, after the work is done, when it's most expensive to fix. We have seen a single frame of offset cost days.

Handles, references and plates

Handles are extra frames on both ends of a shot, past the cut points, usually 8 to 12 a side. We ask for them every time, for boring reasons. Locked cuts still drift, and a four-frame extension shouldn't force a shot to be re-pulled and re-rendered. Trackers and simulations settle better with a run-up. Dissolves need the overlap. A few spare frames at turnover is the cheapest insurance in post.

It also helps to keep two words separate: reference and plate. The editorial reference is a compressed export of the cut, usually scaled down, with a viewing grade and burn-ins over the picture. It's genuinely useful. It shows context, timing and intent, and if source timecode is burnt in, it gives us a second way to confirm we've pulled the right frames. But it's a picture of the cut, not working material. The plate is the material: the shot's camera-original frames at full resolution, clean of burn-ins, colour untouched, timecode intact. We build on plates and check against references. Sending a reference and calling it a plate is the most common first-show mistake we see.

What to send us

The short version, ready to hand to whoever is pulling shots. Agree it before the first sequence locks, whoever your VFX vendor is.

• The locked cut, plus an honest note on how locked it really is.
• An EDL or XML with real clip names and real source timecode, not placeholders.
• A shot list with exact frame ranges and the agreed handles, one line per shot.
• Camera-original media for each shot, or plates pulled with source timecode intact.
• A reference export of the cut with timecode burn-ins, labelled as reference.
• One shot ID used everywhere: the list, the edit file, the folders, the filenames.
• Colour information: the LUT or CDL from the edit, or a note on the pipeline.
• A name we can call when something doesn't line up. Something will.

None of this is exotic, and most of it is one conversation with your editor before the first pull. If VFX is new territory for your production, it's exactly the kind of thing we sort out in a planning session, while getting it right is still free.