Make Weights and Snap Ins

These two terms crop up in pre and post production and affect the duration of your programme. Many producers and production managers use either term to describe the same thing, but it is probably easier to think of them separately.

A makeweight is one, two or sometimes up to 5 pieces of extra material that you have fully edited and post produced that would make your total running time (TRT) longer. eg. a 1 x 50 min programme might request 10 mins of makeweights to enable the broadcaster to sell or repackage the programme as a full 1 x 60 min. Makeweights are usually 1 to 4 minutes of individual small sequences made up of new material that can be inserted into the programme at specified points without disrupting the narrative; alternatively you might be asked to produce a makeweight that can be bolted onto the end of the programme in a single piece, but this is rare nowdays.

Snap Ins is the term used more generally to repair the gaps left when a seamless master is requested. Teases to the commercial breaks and intros to the start of parts are removed and the commercial break gap is closed. This means that sequences previously sitting either side of the commercials now sit as a continuous piece of narrative and in most cases no longer run smoothly - therefore a snap in is required to build the bridge in the narrative allowing you to close the commercial break gap seamlessly without the need for a complete re-edit of your programme.