Barry_Green
Moderator
Well, that's where the concept of the "shooting ratio" comes into play. That's the ratio of film you shoot, to the total running time of the finished product. So if you wanted a 10-minute short, and you shot sixty minutes of film to get that 10-minute short, then that'd be a 6:1 ratio. And that's a misunderstood concept... folks seem to think that shooting at a 6:1 ratio means you get six takes of every setup, and that's way not right. Think about it - if you were shooting a 4:1 ratio, you could shoot a master shot in one take, a medium shot in one take, a closeup in one take, and the reverse in one take -- and that's it. You're out of film. Move on to the next setup because you're done. If somebody blew their line, too bad -- you're on a budget and you've got to get on to the next scene.
Video shooters, first making the move to film, are going to find this incredibly restrictive. But it's also going to instill a whole level of discipline in them that they've never had to face before, and because of that, it could be the best thing to ever happen to them. There's a saying in video, "tape is cheap", meaning, keep shooting until you get it right. I hate that. Because while tape is cheap, TIME isn't! If you're screwing around with take 30 or take 35, you've wasted sooooo much time! If you're paying actors and crew and locations and you're renting equipment, your burn rate might be $1,000 per hour or more... what on earth are you doing going through 30 takes of a scene!?!? Rehearse the scene, get it right, and then set up the camera and roll. Get it right within three takes and then move on. Time is money.
Anyway, back to the question -- what's a reasonable ratio? 12:1 is a pretty exorbitant ratio, IMO. If you're shooting over 12:1, you're probably being quite wasteful and need to tighten up your ship. 6:1 is extremely tight. 10:1 is probably reasonable. So on 10:1, on 16mm film, make the math easy -- a 400' roll runs for 11 minutes, so let's use that as a basis, and say that you'll need 9 rolls of film to end up with a 10-minute film, shot at a 10:1 ratio. So buy 9 rolls of film, get 'em processed and transferred to video, and edit on video.
Processing and transfer are extremely variable costs. You can (or at least used to be able to) find processing for a dime a foot, although it's a lot easier to find it at 15 cents a foot or so. So for each 400' roll, count on $60 for processing. Then transfer, that's the biggie -- you can get it slapped over to video on a cheapo old Rank for $175/hour, or you can get a luxurious wonderful transfer on a Spirit Datacine for maybe $900/hour. And that's $900 per hour of suite time, not of runtime, so if you do extensive color correction and grading in the telecine suite (which is far and away the best place to do it) you might spend several hours, usually at least 3:1 minimum, and maybe up to 10:1 depending on how much fiddling you do with the image.
So a cheap transfer might be a one-light, where you shot color bars at the head of the roll and they dial in the CC so that it makes the bars look good, and then they just roll the film off without any further adjustments. Might take two hours to get through 9 rolls, so $350 for transfer. But if you went through the trouble to make a great-looking short, you might want more than just a cheap one-light Rank transfer too.
