Shooting Ratio Calculator

Shooting ratio is how many minutes of footage you record for every minute that survives into the finished cut. It is the single number that predicts your card budget, your drive budget, and, far more painfully, your edit time.

The formula: Shooting Ratio = Total footage shot ÷ Final runtime

A 10:1 ratio means ten minutes rolled for every minute delivered. Everything else on this page follows from that one number.

Storage: Storage = (minutes shot ÷ 60) × GB per hour for your codec

Worked example: a documentary

You shoot 1,200 minutes (20 hours) over a three-week production and cut it to a 45-minute film, recording 4K 10-bit at roughly 100 GB per hour.

• Ratio: 1,200 ÷ 45 = 26.7:1
• Unused: 1,155 minutes, or 96% of everything you shot
• Storage: 20 × 100 = 2,000 GB, so 2 TB

Then double it. You want a second copy the moment the card comes out of the camera, and a card is not a backup. Add proxies and cache on top and 2 TB of footage lands nearer 5 TB of drives before you have exported anything.

Typical ratios by format

Film-era ratios were a fraction of these, because stock and processing cost real money per foot. Hitchcock is often cited around 3:1 or 4:1, and it shows in the shooting: the coverage exists in the storyboard rather than on the floor. Digital took the marginal cost of another take to almost zero, and ratios went up by an order of magnitude. The cost did not disappear, it moved to the edit.

Which is the point most people miss. Storage is cheap. The 1,155 minutes you did not use in the example above still have to be watched, logged, and rejected by a human being, once at least. Reviewing 20 hours of rushes at anything near real time is a week of somebody’s life, and that is before the first assembly. If your ratio is climbing year on year, the bill is arriving as edit hours, not as hard drives.