What to record about every clip you keep
Note the tool, the plan, the date, what went in and who did the human work. None of it needs a vendor's cooperation, all of it is hard to reconstruct afterwards, and it is what turns a difficult question into a filing question. As of 2026-09-12.
| Field | Answers |
|---|---|
| Delivered file as published | What the audience actually received |
| Inputs supplied | Whether anything came from elsewhere |
| Plan and account | Which permission was in force |
| Tool and version | What produced it |
Inclusion rule. Fields that cannot be reconstructed after the fact. Fields recoverable from the file itself are not listed. Order. Alphabetical by field.
1Why memory does not survive a campaign
Generated footage moves between people. A clip made during a pitch by a freelancer on their own seat ends up in a delivered cut assembled by an editor who never saw where it came from. Six months later nobody can say which account produced it or what plan that account was on.
That is not carelessness, it is the normal shape of production work. The fix is not better memory, it is writing five fields down at the moment the file is created, when they are free to know.
2The five fields
Tool and version. Account and plan in force on that date. The date itself. What was supplied as input, including any reference image, photograph or audio. And the human contributions: who wrote the script, who chose and ordered the shots, who edited.
Everything else people are tempted to record, prompt text, seeds, model parameters, is useful for reproducing a look and largely irrelevant to a rights question. Keep it if it helps the craft; do not confuse it with the file that answers a lawyer.
3Where to keep it so it is still there later
Next to the media, in something plain: a CSV beside the footage, a column in the shot list, a sidecar file per clip. Not in a chat thread, not in a task tracker that will be migrated, not only in somebody's head.
Metadata written into the file itself is convenient and fragile: re-encoding through most editors strips it. Treat any in-file record as a bonus and keep the plain one as the record of truth.
4The input column is the one that earns its keep
Most real exposure in generated advertising enters through what was supplied rather than what was produced: a photograph of a person, a recognisable face, a competitor product, licensed music. A clip with no recorded input is a clip nobody can clear.
It is also the column most often left empty, because at generation time the input feels obvious. It stops being obvious the moment the person who supplied it leaves the project.
5Free seats and trials deserve their own column
A clip generated on a free tier and a clip generated on a paid one can be visually identical and carry different permissions, because several vendors exclude commercial use below a threshold. The file does not know which it is and neither will anyone else later.
So record the plan, not just the tool. If a pitch ran on a trial account and the campaign later shipped on a paid one, the pitch material is the part that needs checking, and the only way to find it is a column that says which seat produced what.
The same applies to a clip regenerated after an upgrade. The new file inherits the new plan; the old one does not retroactively.
6Who should own the file
Whoever assembles the delivery, because they are the last person who touches every clip. Asking each generator to maintain their own records produces several partial files and no complete one, which is the common failure and feels like diligence while it is happening.
One file, one owner, updated as clips arrive rather than reconstructed at the end. The reconstruction is where the errors enter, and it always happens under time pressure.
7What good looks like in practice
A delivered campaign where any clip can be traced in under a minute to a tool, a plan, a date and a set of inputs. That is achievable with a spreadsheet and a habit, and it is worth more than any particular licence tier, because it is the thing that lets you answer rather than guess.
Teams that have been through one rights question build this file afterwards. Building it before costs the same and is considerably cheaper.
8What this does not do
A production file does not grant any right, does not substitute for a licence, and does not make a questionable input acceptable. It records what happened.
That is a modest claim and it is the honest one. The value is that a modest, accurate record beats a confident, reconstructed one every single time the question is asked seriously.
An explainer, not an entry in the register. Vendor statements are held, with their sources, on commercial use, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Related: Asking for a sentence, A supplier file.
9From the making side
Alongside the terms behind “The production file”, SceneMixer's guides describe the work itself this way:
AI Edit Image on a step-2 card keeps the same character and applies a short change you describe — navy blue shirt, short curly hair, smiling — then Apply Edit.
SceneMixer, AI-Editing a Sheet: Outfit, Hair, Expression (read 2026-10-13)
On a segment’s storyboard card, next to Edit, press AI edit.
SceneMixer, AI Edit: Rewrite a Storyboard Segment by Saying What to Change (read 2026-10-13)