After the shoot

Subtitles and captions

Line length is counted in grapheme clusters, not bytes or code units. నమస్కారం is four characters to a Telugu reader and eight UTF-16 units — a 42-character limit measured the wrong way gives Telugu half its allowance.

Each track is checked against a named profile for line length, lines per cue, minimum and maximum duration, reading speed and the gap between cues. The profiles are named rather than hidden because published summaries of the big platforms' guides disagree on reading speed — 20 characters a second in some, 17 in others. Confirm the number against your platform's own current guide and set the profile; an unconfirmed one is visible as such.

Butted cues — one ending exactly where the next begins — are fine. What flickers is a gap of a frame or two, and that is what gets flagged.

SRT and WebVTT, in and out.

The dub pack

A row per line, with the character, the direction, the timecode — and whether the audience sees the line spoken, taken from the coverage the script supervisor already logged. Off camera, length is free; on camera, it has to fit a mouth. Where nobody has logged it, the row says "treat it as on camera until somebody checks" rather than guessing.

Music cue sheets

Shares in basis points, so three equal writers come out 33.34 / 33.33 / 33.33 and total exactly 100%. Usage codes, durations, writers, publishers and their societies. The problems list shows what a society would reject before you send it.

VFX

A shot captures the script line it was briefed against. When blue pages land, the drift report names every shot whose scene has moved under it — orphaned, stale, or its block gone — with the vendor beside it. Before the invoice.

Delivery checklists

Seventeen common deliverables by name, with nothing asserted about what each one has to be: the specification is behind a partner portal and changes. Fill in your platform's spec with its source and the date you confirmed it, and the checklist then checks against that.