GateTrue

What each generator documents about marking its output

Intermediate clip: a file nobody meant to hand over

An intermediate clip is a file from part-way through a workflow: a segment before assembly, a proxy, a review export. Its marking state can differ from the deliverable's, and it is the file most likely to escape. As of 2026-09-22.

Which files a marking value actually describesA production reasons about deliverables, which have names, folders and approvals. The files that circulate are proxies, review cuts and segments sent for an opinion, and only one entry in this register says whether its mark is on them.Does the recorded value cover this fileThe vendor names a stageAnswerableOne entry applies its markat assembly, so segmentsand episodes differ.The vendor says outputRead broadlyThe value covers whateverthe product hands back,with no distinction drawn.A proxy or review exportUnaddressedNo page in this registerdistinguishes a reviewcopy from a deliverable.The missing sentence is one word long: at which step
Fig. 1 An unmarked intermediate can be published by accident; a marked one can reach a client who was not expecting it.
How this register uses the term, and what it excludes. Written 2026-09-22.
The termIntermediate clip
What it namesA file produced part-way through a workflow
What it is notThe finished piece anybody intended to publish
Where the register uses itReasoning about which files a value describes

Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.

1The file nobody documents and everybody has

Proxies, review cuts, a segment sent to a colleague for an opinion, an export made to test a platform: every project generates them and none of them is tracked. They are also the files most likely to be somewhere unexpected a year later, because nobody decided to keep them.

On one entry in this register their marking state is known to differ from the deliverable's, because the mark is applied at assembly. Everywhere else the question is simply unaddressed, which is not the same as the states being identical.

2Why this matters more than it sounds

A production reasoning about marking usually reasons about deliverables, because those are the files with names and folders and approvals. The files that actually circulate are the other ones, and a mark that is present or absent on them is present or absent in places nobody is looking.

That cuts both ways. An unmarked intermediate can be published by accident, undermining a disclosure policy; a marked one can reach a client who was not expecting a watermark, which is a different kind of problem on the same day.

3What the register can say

Which entries name a pipeline stage, which is one. For the rest, the value describes what the vendor said about output without distinguishing kinds of output, so the safe reading is that it covers whatever the product hands back.

Where a reader needs more, one short sentence would do it: a vendor saying at which step its mark is applied. One page here contains such a sentence, and the difference that one word makes is the argument for asking the others.

Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the machine-readable column, what survives an export. Nearby terms: deliverable, console surface, api surface.