Counting Total Hours of Footage for Large Projects

Report · Oct 31, 2018

This question was marked as answered here: Re: Measure total time of footage? but it doesn't actually answer the question. The info panel ONLY counts hours up to 23:59:59:23. I understand timecode can only go up to 24 hours then it must reset to zero. So if I have 25 hours worth of clips selected in the project panel, the info panel only shows that I have 1 hour of footage because it is reseting after every 24 hour increment.

So how then can I calculate the total number of hours in a large project such as a feature doc? If I select all my footage in the project panel, the info panel tells me I only have 5 hours of footage.

This issue has been infuriating me and I'm convinced that there is a simple solution that I'm missing. I know for a fact that PP is regularly used to cut docs with hundreds of hours of footage. I need to have a count to accurately estimate the cost and timeframe for post-production. The first question any outside editor or producer asks is of course "how many hours of footage do you have?" Obviously, "creating a dummy sequence and dropping all of your footage into it" is not an option here, as someone in the other thread suggested.....

Report · Oct 31, 2018

film usage used to be done by feet exposed (in camera reports to lab and post ). X number of feet = x number of minutes as per film size and frame rate and gate size ( 4 perf, 2 perf, etc. )

Now it is more or less the same thing to know your source material (digital ) and check the gigabyte size of all the files on the SD card, hard drive, etc. Instead of film footage is can be thought of as BYTE COUNT.

Video File Size Calculator (by format) - Omni

I chose in the example below my own type of shooting codec and randomly put the number in the gigabyte space...and it automatically gives me the time of 'footage' ( which should now be called byte-age maybe )

Guess it means you'd have to look at your HDD directory (folders where source material resides) add up the total byte count..

Report · Oct 31, 2018

Yeah, that makes sense but it's not a great solution when you're working with a variety of frame rates and formats (which I am). It would actually be easier for me to manually count the increments of 24 hours by selecting clips in the project panel.