Hours of footage
Also known as: footage volume, raw hours
The total running time a session produced, the figure that decides how long reviewing takes and how much storage a card needs.
Updated
What it means
Volume is the defining property of action footage. A camera left running on a mounted position records continuously, so a day out is measured in hours rather than in clips, which is the opposite of how a filmer works.
It is not proportional to content. Two hours of chairlift and approach contain the same number of moments as twenty minutes of park laps, and a card cannot tell the difference between the two.
Every downstream figure follows from it. Editing time, transfer, storage and the Footage-to-highlight ratio are all driven by this one number. Reducing it improves all four at once.
How it works in practice
Recording selectively is the only real reduction. Starting the camera for an attempt and stopping afterwards produces a fraction of the material and loses almost nothing worth keeping. The attempts nobody filmed were mostly the failures.
Where that is impractical, marking helps. A HiLight tag during a long run leaves a pointer that survives into the file and turns hours into a shortlist without any extra effort at the time.
Settings change the storage side without changing the review side. A lower Bitrate halves the space and leaves the same number of hours to watch. The two problems are not one problem.
What to watch out for
Capacity encourages volume. A large card and a long battery remove the limits that used to force selection, and nothing replaces them except a decision. Filling a card used to be the stopping point.
Loop recording is a storage answer, not a review one. Loop recording keeps a card from filling and leaves exactly the same amount of material to go through.
Multiple cameras multiply it directly. Three bodies on one session produce three times the hours and nowhere near three times the usable moments, which is the arithmetic behind a Footage backlog.
How RawClip handles it
Volume is the input the analysis is built for: hours of material are scored without anybody watching them, and what comes back is a short sequence. The amount uploaded affects how long processing takes rather than how much work a person has to do.