I would reccomend a 300 gig hard drive. I don't know how much this will take, as I do not know how Final Cut works but I use AVID Xpress Pro, I filmed Beauty and the Beast in Fresno and cut a Archival copy for the cast. 9 hours of footage from the tapes and a 3 hour final cut, in two parts, which did require two DVDs. Anyway, For this project, I used almost all of my 300 gig external hard drive. I hope this helps!

Matthew Sconce

60min of DV equals roughly 13GB. Plan on shooting at least three times the length of your movie. That would be around 300min of footage = 65GB. Of course, it never works out this well and between backups, audio, motion graphics, and the final export(s) I would suggest around 120-160 GB. Oh yeah, there's the DVD Studio Pro file too.
You can find hard drive enclosures here: ?url? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001UEHI0/ref=pd_sbs_e_2/104-4839192-0707104?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=172282?/url?

and Hard drives: ?url? http://www.outpost.com/?/url?
Good luck!

_______________________
God uses a Mac.

Canon XL-1
1.67ghz MacBook Pro
www.MariposaProd.com

Buy as much as you can afford. You'll thank me later.

And no, 300 minutes of footage for a 100-minute feature probably isn't realistic, unless you're really thrifty with your tape. The general rule is a 10:1 shooting ratio, or you shoot ten minutes of tape for every minute of screen time. I shot somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours of footage for my 90-minute feature. Of course, you don't have to capture ALL of this, but it's good practice to capture MOST of it...

On the other hand, a while ago I shot a short film on real Super-8mm film and managed to achieve almost a 1:1 shooting ratio. But it was abstract, to say the least.

Wow thats a lot. I have never gone over 4:1 and I am a perfection nazi. I agree, get the biggest hard drive you can afford.

_______________________
God uses a Mac.

Canon XL-1
1.67ghz MacBook Pro
www.MariposaProd.com

Yeah, I usually fall on the high end of the spectrum because I tend to just leave the camera running to see if anything good happens. But still... wide shot, close-up on each character, medium shot, etc. can add up.

---------------
Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870">Diary of a Mad Filmmaker</a>

I don't see how it's possible to shoot any film under 15:1 - 20:1. I mean, where's the material to work with in the editing room? Or what about all the tape that's rolling from when you press the red button and yell action until the actors starts acting? And you always have to let the actors breath after the last line has been said. And then you can never just settle with one take.

On my next 50 min film I'm buying 50 DV tapes. I'm thinking of doing a ridely scott and use two cameras on a couple of dialog scenes. I think you get a much better interaction between the two actors if you're shooting a close-up of them both at the same time.
Plus I also have some time-lapse scenes which eat up the tapes.

On my last film that was 74 min I had to learn this stuff the hard way. ?V?

quote:

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Originally posted by amir

I don't see how it's possible to shoot any film under 15:1 - 20:1. I mean, where's the material to work with in the editing room?

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You remind me of another Amir - Amir Naderi, the Iranian Filmmaker. Hours upon hours of footage shot over the course of a year for his last movie.

Footage to feature ratios are going to depend on the individual director and the movie you're making and the type of director you are - there are no hard and fast rules. On one hand, maybe you're doing an improv heavy film, on the other, maybe you have every last shot planned out in advance. 3:1 seems like a good bare minimum to count on though.

In the end, as said above, buy the biggest harddrive you can afford. You can always buy another one, of course, but daisy chaining firewire drives together can severely slow down your editing process.