Working out the number
Take everything the cameras recorded and divide by the finished running time. A 95 minute feature that comes back from set with 1,425 minutes of footage has a 15:1 ratio (1,425 / 95 = 15). Count every camera. If A and B camera both roll on most setups, the footage in the edit bay is close to double what a single camera would give you, and the ratio should say so.
Some productions track it per day. A day with 4 3/8 pages that averages 3 minutes of screen time per page gives about 13 minutes of cut material. If the camera reports show 210 minutes recorded across two bodies, that day ran about 16:1. Watching the daily figure tells a producer early whether the director is shooting far more takes than planned. The shooting ratio calculator does the same arithmetic and turns it into drive space.
What pushes the ratio up
More coverage per scene, extra takes, a second camera, long rolling on improvised or child performances, and documentary interviews all raise it. Stunts and effects shots often need several attempts. Unscripted and observational work runs higher than scripted drama because the story is found in the edit, and a lot of what gets shot is b-roll that may or may not make the cut.
Shooting digitally made rolling cheap on the day, and the cost moved to post. Each extra hour of footage still has to be offloaded, verified, backed up, transcoded to proxy files, synced, and watched.
Where the ratio shows up in the budget
A line producer uses the planned ratio to size several budget lines at once:
| Budget item | How the ratio feeds it |
|---|---|
| Camera media and shuttle drives | Minutes recorded times data rate of the codec |
| DIT hours | Offload and verification time grows with footage |
| Dailies and transcodes | Processing time per hour of footage |
| Assistant editor weeks | Logging and syncing before the assembly cut |
| Archive storage | Two or three copies of the camera originals |
A common mistake is budgeting drives from the one-camera ratio and then adding a B camera in prep without revisiting the media line. Another is using a single average for a mixed shoot. A dialogue day in one room and a car chase day produce very different amounts of footage, so estimate them separately.
The digital imaging technician sees the real ratio first, because the offload logs show how much came off each card. The assistant editor feels it next, when the bins fill up.