The NapierTV Production Blog

When we’re filming we often have a problem with editing. The problem is that we have too much footage.

We’ve got all sorts of footage in the past and people frequently ask us for copies of what we’ve got. We try to provide it when possible but the truth is that it’s a pretty big hassle for us. We don’t always have the time to sit through and chop together three hours of footage only to be told that we then have to burn it to DVD for them too.

We still endure and provide the footage, but I don’t think many people appreciate quite how difficult this can be. A single hour of our standard definition footage weighs in at about 15GB. So if there’s two hours, that’s 30GB of footage we have to store, chop up into 4.4GB chunks and burn to seven separate DVDRs. The burning of the discs themselves takes hours, but chopping up the footage to deliver just the stuff the person or group wants takes even longer!

Now that I’ve finished whining, I’d like to explain the point of this blog entry – when we’re filming, we’re trying to learn to film less. We need to get the material we need, obviously, but anything extra is rarely of that much use. Sure, we use snippets of it in montages, but that’s a few seconds out of half an hour of material.

The reason I’m talking about this is because we’re looking for more camera people for our filming teams. We always need someone who knows how to point a camera at things and is willing to learn the few bits of wisdom we’ve got to share. If you’re interested, there’ll be a blog entry and a video going up over on the Getting Involved channel blog in a bit detailing what our camera people get up to and how you can become one of them!

-Ben
Executive Producer