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> Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.” I thought that might be a mistake. But then it was said again in the arti

> Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.” I thought that might be a mistake. But then it was said again in the article. It’s really not a lot - by our standards today. But then considered that, IDK, for 1969 this might be more then it seems.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
For 16mm film at 24fps, that is 129600 feet of film, or nearly 25 miles. Long lengths of film became physically unwieldy in the days before digital video. (This is also why "footage" is called that.)
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Yes! In college & for years after, my friends and I used to buy 100ft spools of film stock and can it ourselves for stills. Each 100ft spool got us about 18 rolls of 36exp which was good for a semester. Used for cine, that same 100ft was good for about 1 minute of footage..
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Were cinema frames smaller than still? Because at 24fps that number of exposures would be just 30s
    - jdsully 5y ago
      Cinema frames were vertical on the strip (less wide) while stills were horizontal. So still frame will used more space. For widescreen optical compression was used to compress the frame horizontally.
klodolph 5y ago
I searched for “shooting ratio” for documentaries… Google says 60:1, which means that if you were shooting a 1-hour documentary, you would shoot 60 hours of footage. So this is not an unusual amount of footage by today’s standards. It is unusual to have this much previously unreleased footage, from so long ago.
- JCharante 5y ago
  And it looks like this documentary will be 7 hours long, so it's a ratio of 60:7.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I think Jackson looks at a Scorsese film, and thinks "hold my beer" and doubles the runtime on his next project. Then releases the extended version just to juice the pot.
  - texasbigdata 5y ago
    Well there may be a narrator or present scenes. It doesn’t necessarily have to all be the old stuff, just most.
blihp 5y ago
That's actually quite a lot for back then. The 'pro' choices of the day were basically (studio) videotape[1] for TV and film[2] if you had something really important. While there were lots of people (gadget geeks mainly, I would bet) recording silent and shaky 8mm home movies at the time, 'professional' video recording was used sparingly due to the investment (money, time and people) required. The home VCR didn't happen until the mid-70's for those willing to shell out some serious money. It wasn't until the 80's that it became a mass market item due to affordability which is why you can find so much more video preserved from the 80's and after uploaded to YouTube. [1] It was expensive enough at the time that it was often recycled (recorded over) after whatever show it was for was aired rather than archived. [2] Also expensive and is a write-once medium so used even more sparingly.
handmodel 5y ago
Prob a ton of footage technically but from the production side really nothing. I knew someone who did transcriptions for a reality show (essentially would write out dialogue and scene descriptions of something that was being filmed 24/7 so the producers could sift through it) and I imagine every episode had way more than 60 hours of raw footage.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > essentially would write out dialogue and scene descriptions of something that was being filmed 24/7 so the producers could sift through it That sounds like an agonizingly dull job. I read once that the job of listening to tapped phones was a soul-crushing experience, as you're forced to listen to the banality of other peoples' lives.
Stupulous 5y ago
I think it's 'pored over' not doing enough work. I pictured him sitting there, very focused, watching the footage and thought, 'Oh, so he spent a week and a half on this'. But, thinking about it more, he's probably got to pay attention to each person for a whole viewing, replay anything worth including, figure out how to crop, zoom, and cut it together, and view drafts of the final product many times. No doubt he spent at least a thousand hours looking at that 60 hours.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

For 16mm film at 24fps, that is 129600 feet of film, or nearly 25 miles. Long lengths of film became physically unwieldy in the days before digital video. (This is also why "footage" is called that.)

steveBK123 5y ago
Yes! In college & for years after, my friends and I used to buy 100ft spools of film stock and can it ourselves for stills. Each 100ft spool got us about 18 rolls of 36exp which was good for a semester. Used for cine, that same 100ft was good for about 1 minute of footage..
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Were cinema frames smaller than still? Because at 24fps that number of exposures would be just 30s
  - jdsully 5y ago
    Cinema frames were vertical on the strip (less wide) while stills were horizontal. So still frame will used more space. For widescreen optical compression was used to compress the frame horizontally.

klodolph 5y ago

I searched for “shooting ratio” for documentaries… Google says 60:1, which means that if you were shooting a 1-hour documentary, you would shoot 60 hours of footage. So this is not an unusual amount of footage by today’s standards. It is unusual to have this much previously unreleased footage, from so long ago.

JCharante 5y ago
And it looks like this documentary will be 7 hours long, so it's a ratio of 60:7.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I think Jackson looks at a Scorsese film, and thinks "hold my beer" and doubles the runtime on his next project. Then releases the extended version just to juice the pot.
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  Well there may be a narrator or present scenes. It doesn’t necessarily have to all be the old stuff, just most.

blihp 5y ago

That's actually quite a lot for back then. The 'pro' choices of the day were basically (studio) videotape[1] for TV and film[2] if you had something really important. While there were lots of people (gadget geeks mainly, I would bet) recording silent and shaky 8mm home movies at the time, 'professional' video recording was used sparingly due to the investment (money, time and people) required. The home VCR didn't happen until the mid-70's for those willing to shell out some serious money. It wasn't until the 80's that it became a mass market item due to affordability which is why you can find so much more video preserved from the 80's and after uploaded to YouTube. [1] It was expensive enough at the time that it was often recycled (recorded over) after whatever show it was for was aired rather than archived. [2] Also expensive and is a write-once medium so used even more sparingly.

handmodel 5y ago

Prob a ton of footage technically but from the production side really nothing. I knew someone who did transcriptions for a reality show (essentially would write out dialogue and scene descriptions of something that was being filmed 24/7 so the producers could sift through it) and I imagine every episode had way more than 60 hours of raw footage.

WalterBright 5y ago
> essentially would write out dialogue and scene descriptions of something that was being filmed 24/7 so the producers could sift through it That sounds like an agonizingly dull job. I read once that the job of listening to tapped phones was a soul-crushing experience, as you're forced to listen to the banality of other peoples' lives.

Stupulous 5y ago

I think it's 'pored over' not doing enough work. I pictured him sitting there, very focused, watching the footage and thought, 'Oh, so he spent a week and a half on this'. But, thinking about it more, he's probably got to pay attention to each person for a whole viewing, replay anything worth including, figure out how to crop, zoom, and cut it together, and view drafts of the final product many times. No doubt he spent at least a thousand hours looking at that 60 hours.