Math & shooting ratios

If you remember, a couple of weeks ago I threw away files from my Capture Scratch folder. So today I spent about four hours digitizing. I'm almost, but not completely done. I didn't mind recapturing which is probably why I was a bit cavalier about trashing capture scratch. If you come from the design world, you know the "build it twice" idea... you building something, then build it again from scratch letting your knowledge from the first time inform the second time. This strategy works well for a lot of things. This time, I gave the files proper names when capturing (previously I had hundreds of files named Untitled, Untitled-1, Untitled1-1, etc.) Also, last time I captured without audio. There are some segments where it will be nice to have the original audio. I was also able to considerably streamline everything digitizing only what I needed.

This was also an opportunity to look over everything we've shot. We started shooting in February but it seems like a LOT longer than 7 months ago. Looking at those old tapes was like looking at a time capsule. Dozens and dozens of lighting experiments. A lot of bad lighting. A lot of shots that were shot centered and straight on going for that "theatrical approach." I also noticed the difference in Ben's performances. They are sometimes a little stiff, mostly because I'm forcing him to stay in frame when I'm in tight on a tripod or asking him to do some awkward thing. I now realize I can ask him to relax a bit more, that the formality I'm going on does not equal stiffness. If he were more experienced, he'd probably be able to work around my direction.

I've captured about 40 GB so far. This means that I've captured about 160 minutes. Our short is about 12 minutes long, so that's a 13 to 1 ratio. That didn't seem like much until I remembered that's the *captured* ratio, not the shooting ratio. I only captured about 1/3 of what we shot. So we shot about 40 to 1... somewhere between a feature film ratio and a documentary ratio. Actually, though, I'd say a great deal of that footage was us just doing tests and trying to figure out how to light at the beginning. We've been much more efficient in our latest shoots. So in a hypothetical next production, we'd probably be shooting about 20 to 1. In other words, the backwards, "work it out in the shooting" approach requires about double of what you might expect to shoot (e.g., 10 to 1).