Action phase — The temporal state of an action: anticipation, onset, continuation, apex, completion, or consequence.
Active speaker — The person currently producing speech; not necessarily the correct visual subject.
Ambience — Environmental sound that establishes place, time, scale, and activity.
Aspect fitness — How well a shot or graphic survives a target frame shape and interface exclusions.
Beat — The smallest narrative unit that changes an audience state through new information, action, or emotion.
Blocking — Planned subject position, orientation, movement, gaze, and interaction in relation to camera, light, and environment.
B-roll — Supplemental image material used for evidence, mechanism, orientation, texture, contrast, metaphor, compression, or edit cover.
Candidate — A proposed clip, story, shot, generation, edit, or version awaiting filtering, scoring, and review.
Causal edge — A graph relationship indicating that one event, condition, or decision contributes to another.
Claim — A proposition presented as true, probable, remembered, believed, or alleged.
Clip — A bounded source interval plus meaning, context dependencies, story role, technical state, rights, and provenance.
Clip handle — Extra source time retained before and after a selected interval for later trimming and transitions.
Color management — The documented interpretation and transformation of image color from source through working space to output display.
Completeness — Degree to which a unit can be understood without unresolved references, missing scope, hidden qualification, or omitted consequence.
Constraint — A hard requirement or soft preference limiting allowed outputs.
Content decision — A choice about meaning, story, evidence, quotation, order, or inclusion.
Content credentials — Cryptographically supported provenance assertions about media origin and editing history where implemented.
Context graph — Network of transcript units, entities, questions, claims, qualifications, corrections, causes, and references.
Continuity bible — Stable specifications for character, world, props, camera, lighting, performance, and temporal state across shots.
Coverage — The set of shots needed to communicate action, performance, space, reaction, evidence, transitions, and edit flexibility.
Cut — A boundary relationship between two time ranges that creates continuity, contrast, omission, rhythm, or inference.
Decision trace — Record of conditions, rules, scores, agent/human choices, overrides, and affected versions.
Delivery profile — Target-specific picture, audio, caption, metadata, and encoding requirements.
Diegetic — Existing within the perceived story world and potentially perceivable by its subjects.
Diarization — Estimation of who spoke when.
Discontinuity — A deliberate or accidental break in time, space, identity, movement, sound, style, or causality.
Editability — Degree to which an asset has stable content, handles, entry/exit states, and compatible continuity for assembly.
Editorial timeline — Ordered source ranges, tracks, transitions, and audio relationships used to construct the program.
Entry state — The observable condition of subject, world, camera, light, and motion at the beginning of a shot.
Evidence state — The reviewed relationship between a claim and available support, contradiction, uncertainty, or source type.
Exit state — The observable condition of subject, world, camera, light, and motion at the end of a shot.
Graphic task — The information operation a visual must support, such as comparison, sequence, mechanism, flow, or uncertainty.
Hard constraint — A requirement that filters out candidates before ranking.
Hook — An opening change in attention built from clarity, consequence, specificity, credible promise, and forward movement.
Information owner — The speaker, object, document, action, or graphic currently carrying the essential information.
J-cut — An edit where incoming audio begins before incoming picture.
LAKA change level — Baseline, minor, major, structural, or paradigm degree of variation.
LAKA meta-variable — One of fourteen dimensions describing change: magnitude, rate, direction, scope, depth, duration, frequency, acceleration, variability, detectability, reversibility, propagation, amplification, and accumulation.
L-cut — An edit where outgoing audio continues after outgoing picture.
Likeness — Identifiable representation of a person’s appearance, voice, or identity characteristics.
Look — Creative color and texture treatment distinct from source interpretation and output transform.
Master — A wide or complete coverage shot that establishes spatial relationships and often preserves full action.
Mezzanine — High-quality intermediate/master file intended for further encoding or preservation.
Motivation — The named perceptual, narrative, spatial, emotional, informational, or rhythmic function of a production choice.
Narrative graph — Ordered audience-facing structure controlling release, emphasis, withholding, and payoff.
Negative fill — Reduction of ambient reflected light to increase modeling or separation.
Non-destructive edit — Edit represented as references and operations without altering source media.
Object constancy — Visual continuity that lets an audience perceive the same concept/object as it moves or transforms.
Open loop — An unresolved question, promise, danger, prediction, contradiction, or incomplete action held in audience memory.
OpenTimelineIO (OTIO) — Editorial interchange model representing clips, timing, tracks, transitions, markers, metadata, and external media references.
Paradigm change — Variation that changes the governing format, perspective, representational mode, or premise.
Payoff — Beat that resolves or transforms an earlier setup, question, promise, prediction, or motif.
Picture lock — Approved editorial picture timing after which changes are tightly controlled and propagated to finishing.
Point of view — The narrative and camera relation governing whose access, knowledge, and experience organize perception.
Practical — A light source visible within the frame or story environment.
Prelap — Incoming scene sound heard before its image, often synonymous with a scene-level J-cut.
Proposition — Smallest unit of asserted or questioned meaning in speech or text.
Provenance — Traceable origin, parent assets, tools, transformations, decisions, and rights state of media.
Proxy — Lower-bandwidth derived media used for responsive editing while retaining links to source.
Reaction — Observable response to a temporally specific stimulus.
Render decision — Choice about framing, effects, graphics layout, captions, encoding, and target-specific presentation.
Render timeline — Delivery-specific effects, reframing, graphics, captions, color, mix, and output instructions.
Rational time — Time represented as integer value over rate to avoid floating-point frame ambiguity.
Room tone — Stable local background sound captured or constructed to preserve continuity in dialogue edits.
Rule trace — Explanation of which rule conditions matched and which actions were proposed or enforced.
Scene — Continuous or conceptually unified unit with an objective, pressure, behavior, turn, and exit value.
Semantic timeline — Ordered beats, propositions, claims, entities, dependencies, and narrative functions independent of rendering.
Setup — Earlier beat that prepares an expectation, fact, object, motif, question, or rule for later use.
Shot — Continuous visual time range defined by subject, camera, optics, framing, focus, exposure, movement, blocking, duration, and function.
Soft preference — Weighted criterion used to rank valid candidates after hard constraints pass.
Source asset — Immutable original media identity with checksum and metadata.
Story graph — Representation of actual or asserted events, states, chronology, entities, and causal relations.
Story role — Functional label such as hook, context, obstacle, evidence, reveal, payoff, or takeaway.
Synthetic media — Media substantially generated or transformed by computational models rather than directly captured.
Temporal handle — Extra frames/samples surrounding a selected edit range.
True peak — Estimated peak level between digital samples used in delivery limiting and QC.
Uncertainty ledger — Record of unresolved facts, source conflicts, inference, confidence, and required review.
Version dependency — Relationship showing which outputs inherit content or rendering decisions from another version.
Volumetric — Representing a decision as a position in many dimensions, enabling constrained generation and comparison rather than one preset.
Working space — Defined color space in which scene or display image operations are performed.