shot footage/used footage ratio – how do I work that out?

[Andrew Rendell]

Well, used footage is your cut’s running time, shot footage is the duration of all your rushes, so you could just loop them all and drop them onto a new timeline and read the duration (actually it’s probably better to loop groups of rushes and drop them onto a new timeline, then when you get to a couple of hours, start another new timeline… then add up the lengths of the timelines).

In theory you could probably work it out by doing an export in current settings and comparing the size of that with the amount of storage used for the source media, but I think that in practice it would be too fiddly to work out the actual size of just the source material without getting other stuff included and messing up your calculation.

TBH your used footage could be longer than the running time if you’ve got lots of layered effects, but most of the time it wouldn’t be enough to make much difference to the shooting ratio.