What “satsuei” actually means now

撮影 (satsuei) literally means “photography”, a name the industry kept from the era when a finished cel — character art on clear acetate, laid over a painted background — was physically photographed frame by frame on a multi-plane rostrum camera to produce the final film. There is no camera and no cel in a modern digital pipeline, but the term survived because the job it names is functionally the same: taking every finished layer of a cut and combining them into the frame the audience actually sees, with whatever grading, glow or camera move the shot calls for.

It’s a useful reminder that a lot of anime production vocabulary is inherited film-era terminology bolted onto a digital process — “genga” and “douga” (key/inbetween drawings) predate digital ink-and-paint by decades too.