Dailies have an image problem: the word sounds like something only a show with a DIT trailer and a colorist on payroll gets to have. But strip the department away and dailies are just a promise, made fresh every shoot day: everything we shot today is safe, checked, synced, watchable, and in the editor’s hands before we shoot tomorrow. Features keep that promise with a crew. You can keep it with a laptop, free software, and about an hour of discipline, and the productions that do are the ones that never have the “we lost card three” conversation.
Last updated: August 2026. Some links below are affiliate links; buying through them supports the site at no cost to you. Tool prices are early-August checks; the workflow itself is modeled on the structure the big streamers formalized, scaled down to crews of one to five.
TLDR
If you just want the answer: offload with checksum software (Hedge’s OffShoot, about $169), let DaVinci Resolve’s free version do everything else (sync, one-light color, burn-ins, proxy renders), and deliver editorial a folder of proxies plus reports the same night. That’s a streamer-grade dailies pipeline for under $200, and this guide is the step-by-step.
The five jobs (Netflix does these; so can you)
Netflix publishes dailies best practices for its vendors, and the structure is worth stealing because it’s just organized common sense: verify, process, QC, deliver, report. Same five jobs whether the “department” is twelve people or you at the kitchen table after wrap. Here’s each one at indie scale.
Job 1: Verified offload
Cards get copied with software that mathematically proves the copy, to two destinations, before anything gets formatted. The modern checksum standard is xxHash (dramatically faster than the old MD5 at the same job), and the tool tier list is short: OffShoot (about $169, xxHash, dead simple, from the Hedge folks) for most people; Silverstack (about $399/year) when you want a real clip library with metadata and label printing; ShotPut Pro when a production requires its per-transfer PDF reports. Drag-and-drop in Finder is how cards die with no witnesses; this category exists because the copy you didn’t verify is the one that was incomplete. Full card-and-reader hardware picks live in the offload workflow guide and the DIT kit.
Job 2: Process (sync, color, metadata)
This is where free Resolve replaces a department. Import the day’s media, sync audio (timecode if you jam-synced, waveform if you didn’t), drop the show LUT on everything, ride exposure per clip, and add burn-ins. ARRI literally publishes a how-to for running dailies through Resolve, which tells you how normal this path is at every budget. The color convention to respect, straight from the streamer rulebooks: dailies color is primaries only, a show LUT for the look plus a per-clip trim for exposure and balance (the “one-light”). No secondaries, no windows, no creative grading; those don’t survive the round-trip into editorial and finishing, and dailies color’s whole job is to be reproducible later.
Job 3: QC (the two-minute version)
Facilities QC in calibrated suites; your version is watching heads and tails of every clip and full takes of anything the director flagged, on a screen you trust, with headphones on. You’re looking for the disasters that get more expensive overnight: focus buzz, a dead channel of audio, drive errors, the boom in frame for an entire setup. Two minutes per card now versus a reshoot conversation next week.
Job 4: Deliver (proxies + sound + notes)
The professional deadline is editorial-ready dailies within 12 hours of wrap, and it’s a good one to adopt because it forces the whole pipeline to be repeatable when you’re tired. The indie deliverable: a proxy render of everything (1080p ProRes Proxy or H.264, burn-ins on), original sound files, and the day’s notes, organized in the same folder structure every single day. If the editor is you, this is still worth doing properly; future-you opening the project is a different person with no memory of which take the director loved.
Job 5: Report
One email or note: what was shot, card count, any problems, anything editorial should know. Thirty seconds. On a crew of one it feels silly right up until an insurance claim, a reshoot debate, or a “when did that drive fail” forensic, at which point the boring nightly notes are the most valuable document on the production.
Camera-to-cloud: what it replaces (and what it doesn’t)
The 2026 wrinkle is that proxies can now skip the laptop entirely. Frame.io’s camera-to-cloud is included on every plan including the free tier, and the native-integration list has grown real: RED, Fujifilm, Panasonic, recent Canon cinema bodies (the C50 ships with it built in), plus Teradek and Atomos boxes bolting it onto everything else. Shoot, and proxies land in editorial’s browser before the card comes out of the camera.
Understand precisely what that replaces: the distribution leg. The verified offload of camera originals (Job 1) still happens, every day, exactly as above, because the cloud proxy is not your negative. C2C plus Resolve is a complete small-crew dailies pipeline at nearly zero software cost; C2C instead of data management is a fancy way to lose a card. Our media management guide draws that line in more detail.
Watermarked review copies without the enterprise contract
Producers and clients sometimes need dailies access, and leaked footage is a real fear on anything with a name attached. The enterprise answer (forensic per-viewer watermarking) lives in Frame.io’s top custom tier and costs accordingly. The indie answer costs nothing: Resolve’s data burn-in tool overlays viewer names, dates, or “PROPERTY OF” text baked into the review renders, and a password-protected Vimeo review page or private link handles distribution. A five-person production gets 90% of the deterrent for 0% of the contract.
The stack at three budgets
| Tier | Offload | Engine | Distribution | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo / $0-ish | OffShoot (~$169, one-time) | Resolve free | Drive handoff or free Frame.io | ~$169 |
| Small crew | Silverstack (~$399/yr) | Resolve free + show LUT discipline | Frame.io Pro seats + C2C where cameras allow | ~$600/yr |
| Facility-adjacent | Silverstack XT | Colorfront / Assimilate Live Looks near set | Frame.io Team+, forensic watermarking | Quote territory |
The middle tier is where most readers of this site live, and the load-bearing fact about it: the expensive part of that stack is the discipline, not the software. The facility tier exists for volume (multiple cameras, daily turnover to multiple stakeholders, on-set live grading), not because the pixels come out better.
FAQ
Do I really need checksum software for a two-camera shoot?
The card doesn’t know how big your production is. Copy errors are silent, drives fail young, and the $169 tool pays for itself the first time it catches a bad copy you’d have discovered at the edit. This is the cheapest insurance in the entire pipeline; the UPS guide covers the second cheapest.
Should dailies look good or look accurate?
Consistent beats both. The show LUT plus one-light convention exists so every department sees the same reasonable image and nobody falls in love with a grade that was never real. Save the beauty pass for the actual grade; the color spaces reference explains the log-to-709 chain doing the work here.
What about DIT work beyond dailies?
On-set color management, camera matching, exposure advice to the DP… that’s the full DIT job, and the cart that does it is its own guide. This page is the after-wrap half; the DIT kit guide is the on-set half. Together they’re the whole Ingest stage of the workflow map.
In conclusion
Dailies are a promise with a checklist attached, and the checklist fits on an index card: verify twice, sync and one-light, watch the heads and tails, deliver the same folder shape every night, write the note. The tools cost less than a card reader now; what the streamers buy with their contracts is mostly the discipline, and discipline is free. Run it for one full project and the after-wrap hour becomes automatic. As always, this is the version that works at the scale I work at; if your production has a wrinkle mine don’t, the comments are open.
