# 21 — Glossary

**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.