I always wondered this
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Took a film tour at Disney Hollywood Studios once.
They explained that the clapper was to sync up the video and audio streams, which were recorded separately– the camera just does the looks and they had a detached microphone for sound.
It’s likely this is still how its done despite that there are cameras that have built-in sound. But they would line up the “clap” in the audio with the moment that the bar closed on the board on camera, so it was easy to get the feeds to come together properly.
It has a few.
One is that it has things like the scene, scene number, take number, etc recorded on it for the editor.
Another is that when it is clapped shut it makes a sound that can be used to make sure that the picture and audio are synced. It gives a very exact moment that the sound is produced.
The Slate, or Clapboard, is used for the production people to keep track of each scene, and take.
See this webpage….
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-to-use-a-film-slate/
Let’s say that you are filming with multiple cameras from multiple angles. You may have also multiple microphones. When you snap the clapboard down, all the cameras and all the microphones record a spike of noise at the same time. When you go back later to edit, you take the footage from all the cameras and all the sound from the microphones and you can line them all up on that spike. This way you can edit between cameras (showing some from camera 1, then 3, then 2 …. and the sounds will still line up correctly without having to adjust very fine details manually.
High-end cameras are often *just* the cameras, which is fine because an included microphone would be bad for audio quality. You’d want to use a separate, high quality mic for good audio anyway. You may also have multiple mics.
Since the camera and mics are separate, the video and audio aren’t automatically synced like they are with consumer level cameras. They have to be synced manually during the edit. The sharp movement and clap makes it easier to sync.
Even in smaller productions, it’s helpful to record the take and scene. I was editing together a video recorded on my phone, and it was super annoying to figure out which one was the take where I coughed halfway through, or forgot a word… I had written down “#1,#2, etc but when I uploaded and started rearranging clips it was useless. If I had used a sign within the clip to designate it as “scene 1, take 1” it would have been easier
the clapping sound is used to sync the audio to the video (they’re two separate recordings), allow you to sync the videos to each other if you have multiple cameras, and finally since you have it in frame anyway you can write the scene info on it for the editor to have on hand.
@people in the comments. Even tbough the mic and cameras are all seperate, would it not be better to digitally synchronize them? Like a UV flash thats visible to the cameras but not humans, so they start at the same time?
The clap is to sync the audio to the footage and/or to sync footage together with itself, the words on the clapper tell the editor what take it is, or some other information to catalog and keep track of what was shot.
A lot of this is made redundant by cameras that capture audio, and the ability to name files whatever you want. Back in the destructive editing days they didn’t have these modern luxuries, they literally had to slice the film and splice it together. One wrong move and they could be fucked.
As others have said, it serves to record scene and take information into the video, and to help sync up audio recorders with the video from cameras. Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that when the slate is shown to the camera, the assistant holding the slate will read out the information using suitable phonetics (eg “scene 3, take 2, camera A for alpha”) so that it’s embedded in the audio recording as well. If video is recorded with no sound then the slate can be shown without clapping (usually shown by placing a hand in the way of the clapper), also, it could be shown at the end of a take (traditionally upside down), sometimes this is to show a take that has been cut early.
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