One question that no video makers (or photographers in general for that matter) can get to agree on is what percentage of footage is actually used in a production as against the total shot. It doesn’t matter whether it is a family made DVD of the latest holiday or the next Peter Jackson (or flop in the case of King Kong), every single person you talk to will have a different opinion. And this figure of course dictates how much you should / could shoot for any given production.

My mate Rossco, the best damn photographer in the known universe, does nature and ecology study photography for his own creativity and V8 Supercars for money making – or what laughingly masquerades as that if you are not in the V8 Supercar hierarchy. So I am told.

Rossco has been known to take upwards of 4000 shots in the course of a race weekend to get a single “money shot”. As such, he uses an awful lot of CF cards and batteries in his two Canon digital cameras that have enough lenses if you screwed them all together I swear you could crawl up them to the moon. Between events, the images are downloaded to his ASUS Lamborghini laptop and the duds trashed to free up cards. (Well what else would a motor sport snapper use? I personally use an Acer Ferrari. It’s a car thing I guess)

Rossco can take over 4000 shots to get the single :money shot"

When I am videoing a motor sport event, I would go through 4 hours of footage over a racing Sunday quite easily, getting establishment shots of the location, grid shots, overheads, pit images and the like to tart up the final images of the actual race footage itself – all the while hoping that you manage to be on location for that dramatic car-to-wall bingle or car-to-car T-bone. But that’s rare more’s the pity.

At the end of the day however, my personal average would be around10% of footage shot would be used in the final production. The same seems to apply on overseas holidays; on my external hard drives that I use for online storage (tapes are never re-used and kept pristine with the original shots) I have video going back 8 years of trips to Vanuatu, Fiji, Norfolk Island, the Great Ocean Rd, Tasmania, car trips across Australia, Brampton Island and Broome. Checking over the weekend as a curiosity, that figure of 10% seems to be reasonably consistent for me.

On that note, while on holidays, don’t forget to grab copies of brochures, the local newspapers and so on as these can be shot as a still and then the “Ken Burns effect” used to break up otherwise potentially boring holiday shots.

When it comes down to what to shoot, I tend to err on the side of more is good. The simple fact is that you usually cannot go back and shoot it again. This applies to any native animals you may come across, interesting or unusual people or places (including buildings, nature features and so on). At the back of your mind, keep in focus that what you are trying to achieve is to create a sort of Time Machine on tape or DVD of a holiday or record of event that you can revisit at anytime you like.

This subject was brought back to me most heavily this weekend as I lost my much loved 15 year old faithful hound VB the Dog after he suffered a stroke. Sadly, I’ll never have too much footage or enough photographs to create that particular Time Machine to my satisfaction.

RIP VB. You are badly, badly missed.