Editing Clapperboard (section)

==Construction==
[[File:A Traditional Wooden Slate Clapperboard.jpg|thumb|A traditional wooden [[Slate (writing)|slate]] clapperboard.]]
A traditional clapperboard (i.e., a dumb slate) consists of a wooden slate with a hinged clapper stick attached to its top. A modern clapperboard generally uses a pair of wooden sticks atop either a [[whiteboard]] or a translucent [[acrylic glass]] slate (the latter being easily legible via the light coming through it from the scene about to be shot).  The clapper sticks traditionally have diagonally interleaved lines of black and white to ensure the camera can capture a clear visual image of the clap in most lighting conditions. In recent years sticks with calibrated color stripes have become available.

A digislate is a clapperboard with an inbuilt electronic box displaying [[SMPTE timecode]]s. The timecode displayed on the clapperboard will have been [[jam sync]]ed with the internal clock of the camera, so that in theory it should be easy for the film editor to pull the timecode metadata from the video file and sound clip and synchronize them together.<ref name="Holman_Page_68" />  When SMPTE timecodes actually work as intended, they relieve the film editor of the age-old chore of manually matching the exact frame in which the clapper sticks close to the "corresponding peak in the audio wave".<ref name="Holman_Page_68" />  This chore can be very "tedious" if "there is a large number of shots in a program".<ref name="Holman_Page_68" /> However, electronic timecodes can still drift during a long shooting day, so the clapper sticks on the clapperboard still need to be closed together in the traditional fashion, in order to ensure there is a way of manually synchronizing video and audio if matching the digital timecode fails.<ref name="Holman_Page_68" />