Shooting Ratio

What this is about

Producers use the ratio as a planning number: it predicts card and storage needs, DIT hours and edit duration. Genres differ sharply — a tightly boarded commercial can stay lean, documentary and improvisation climb high, multi-camera formats multiply everything. On set the ratio turns into discipline: a director who shoots fifteen takes of a safe close-up is spending the ratio where it buys nothing. In the edit suite an unexpectedly high ratio means longer logging before the first cut exists.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• The ratio is an average across the shoot; single scenes may legitimately explode it.
• Digital made high ratios cheap to record but not cheap to watch, sort and back up.
• Not a quality metric in either direction: low can mean prepared, high can mean searching.

With TillyGen

A complete TillyGen shot list makes the expected ratio visible early: planned shots and takes instead of a guess at wrap.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.