Ratio of total footage shot to final cut length — 10:1 means ten hours raw for one hour finished. Low on doc shoots, high on narrative with multiple takes per setup.
On set, the shoot ratio dictates the budget, editing time, and ultimately the quality of your selections in the editing room. Ten hours of footage for sixty minutes of film—this isn't an academic numbers game, but pure production reality. The higher the ratio, the more security you have in post-production, but the more expensive your project becomes.
The shoot ratio is directly linked to your directorial philosophy and your financial resources. In documentary work—for example, in the vérité style—you often work with ratios between 3:1 and 5:1. You roll, observe, and extract the best from the continuum. This is lean, efficient, and sometimes improvisational necessity. In narrative feature films, however, especially when it comes to perfectionist multiple takes, variations in timing, or over-insuring against re-shoots, we quickly land at 10:1, 15:1, sometimes even higher. I've seen productions that ran at 20:1—pure insurance, but also pure waste of space in the DIT truck.
What many underestimate: the shoot ratio not only influences storage volume but also your editing work. At 5:1, the editor immediately knows which takes are the best—little waste, clear decisions. At 25:1, you sit in the editing room and blindly sift through variations, many of which are functionally identical. This costs time, money, and often intuition. Conversely, setting ratios too low—2:1 or below—creates pressure on set. You can't waste a single take, can't miss an experimental chance. This inhibits creativity.
Practically, you calculate the ratio as early as possible: determine with the director and editor how much variance you need. Feature film with dialogue? At least 8:1. Action sequences with stunts? Can be quicker, 6:1 is often sufficient. Commercial spot in loop mode? 4:1, anything else is a luxury. Then multiply your target runtime by the ratio—that's your storage budget, that's your generator power on set, that's your editor's schedule.
The shoot ratio is not an abstract KPI. It is the interface between directorial ambition and production reality.