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Shooting ratios
Documentaries are made in the edit. Unlike a scripted film, a documentary does not know its story in advance, so filmmakers shoot far more than they use: shooting ratios of fifty or a hundred to one are common, and a ninety-minute film may come from a hundred hours or more of footage. That makes logging essential. Teams note the timecode, the people, the subject and the best lines of every clip, often transcribing interviews in full, so that a sentence spoken in October can be found in July. Footage is backed up at least twice, because a lost hard drive can lose a year. Many funds ask for a short excerpt or work-in-progress cut, partly to check progress and partly because cutting even five minutes shows whether the material has a story.