Slate info for AVCHD shooting
 

I have an opportunity to create (re-create) my dry erase clapper board in any configuration I want. (I had one of my students "clean the board, and to my dismay, did a FANTASTIC job of cleaning it, making it a beautiful BLANK slate!)

I could put the original ROLL, SCENE, TAKE, etc on the board, but in deference to my now shooting solely in AVCHD, do y'all see any other info on the slate besides:

PRODUCTION NAME
SCENE
TAKE
DATE
DIRECTOR
CAMERA (for multi camera shoots)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

info for clapperboard
 

You may not have the need for the 'ROLL' field, but there has may be some other piece of information related to the way your data is organised. I shoot AVCHD on 8GB cards, and these cards get backed up onto an external HD, as well as on dual-layer DVDs. One sub-directory for a cardfull's worth, and one DVD±R-DL. Each DVD has the same name as the sub-directory, and this may be the piece of information that you may want on your clapperboard (perhaps not ROLL, but CARD).

That way, when you edit this stuff and need to find out what 'roll' (disc/sub-directory) the file came from, your slate shot will have it.

I don't know what scale productions you're shooting, for me, "Director" is not useful information. I have five different mics I use, I like knowing what mic was used. If I slate I'll put that.

Lately, by slate has been my left and right hands slapping together.

I used the slate with just the info described. I kept the DIRECTOR line as a little "gimme" for me... (we all do something like that!)

I found that by slating as normal, with scene and take prominent, I could easily correlate the file name to a particular take, using the hand written camera reports for verification. Let me tell you, seeing the slate in the thumbnail of the file made editing so easy! I had almost three hours of footage that needed to be edited down to below seven minutes. The extra time taken slating each shot was well worth it. I didn't need the clapper part, but hey, it's traditional. The other info was what REALLY worked!

This might be a dumb question, but when you slate the shot, do you zoom in on it and then zoom back out to shoot the scene?

It depends on the shot, with most I moved/zoomed the camera to get the slate info then repositioned with the camera recording. Lot of wasted footage on the SDHC card, but no loss really. Other shots where I needed a particular locked down angle, my script supervisor would position the slate where I could read it for a few seconds and then move out of the way.

Either way works. It depends on the scene, location, people, etc...