A YouTube talking-head editor imports about 3x what they ship. A wedding shooter imports about 7x. A commercial editor imports about 12x. A feature documentary editor imports about 32x. Same job description on paper. Wildly different storage realities.
These numbers come from analyzing the timeline-versus-imported footprint of 200 completed Premiere projects. The cross-genre comparison is more useful than any single average, because the reasons for the waste are different in each format. If you're a producer trying to budget storage, or a shooter trying to explain to a client why the dailies drive is twice what they expected, the breakdown matters.
Wedding: 6-8x
Wedding work sits in a strange middle. The shoot ratio looks reasonable until you realize how it gets there.
A typical two-shooter wedding day produces 400-600 GB of footage for an 8-12 minute final film. The ratio comes out around 7x. The reason it's not higher: weddings are unrepeatable. There's no take two on the first kiss. Editors shoot generously because they have to, but they also tend to use more of what they shot. Nearly every meaningful moment ends up somewhere, even if just in the extended cut or a parent-handoff version.
The waste sits in two places. First, redundant coverage from the second shooter (they were also pointed at the bride during the vows, only one angle made the cut). Second, the long pull-up reception coverage where you grabbed forty minutes of dancing for a 90-second montage.
Storage planning rule of thumb: Budget 50-80 GB per delivered minute on a wedding. That's your dailies-to-archive ratio if you keep everything.
Commercial: 10-20x
Commercial work is where waste gets industrial. The 12x median in the dataset hides a wide range. Branded shorts come in around 8x, full agency commercials with multiple talent and locations push 20x.
The drivers are structural and impossible to fight from the cutting room.
Coverage requirements: a hero product shot has to be filmed wide, medium, tight, top-down, and rotating, because the agency might want any of them. You ship one. Safety takes: a 30-second spot routinely shoots six takes of every line because the client is in video village and asks for one more. Multiple cameras on insert days. Stock B-roll downloads in batches of fifteen. Color and lighting tests that get ingested with the dailies.
A :60 commercial with a final cut footprint of 4 GB will sit on a 60-80 GB project drive at delivery. That ratio doesn't shrink over time. It just gets older.
Storage planning rule of thumb: Budget 60-100 GB per delivered minute on a commercial. Higher if there's product photography or multiple talent days.
Documentary: 20-50x
Documentary is the genre where the math breaks producers' brains. A short doc can hit 18x. A feature can hit 32x. The worst project in my sample was a feature doc at 64x, meaning one minute of finished film for every 64 minutes of dailies.
The reason is simple: documentary doesn't have a script that constrains coverage. Interviews run for two hours and yield 90 seconds of usable soundbite. Vérité shooting captures whatever happens, which is usually nothing. Archival sourcing pulls in hours of historical footage to license one shot. Subjects get shot across multiple shoot days, in multiple locations, over months or years.
There's no version of doc production that fixes this. The form requires overshooting. The only place to get the storage back is in post, after delivery, when you can finally identify the 95 percent of dailies that didn't make it into the locked cut.
Storage planning rule of thumb: Budget 200-400 GB per delivered minute on a feature doc. For series, multiply by episode count and add 20 percent for cross-episode reuse.
YouTube: 3-5x
YouTube is the lowest-waste format in the dataset, by a wide margin. A scripted talking-head video imports about 3x what it ships. A more produced vlog or edited piece runs 4-5x.
Why is YouTube so much lower? Almost every reason for high shoot ratios disappears.
There's usually one camera, sometimes two. The shooter and editor are the same person, which means the editor knows what's usable in real time and doesn't waste a second on alternates they already rejected. There's no client in video village calling for safety takes. There's no agency demanding coverage variations. The script is tight because the runtime is tight, and overshooting for a 10-minute video means you have to actually edit through the extra material, which the editor knows and avoids on the front end.
The waste that does exist is mostly screen recordings, B-roll downloads, and false-start takes from when the talent flubbed their first attempt.
Storage planning rule of thumb: Budget 15-25 GB per delivered minute for talking-head YouTube. Double it for vlog or location work.
What to Do With These Numbers
If you're producing, use these as the multiplier for your storage line item. A 10-minute commercial isn't a 10-minute storage problem. It's a 100-200 GB storage problem before color, audio, and exports. A feature doc isn't 90 minutes. It's 30+ TB of dailies.
If you're editing, use these as the cleanup target after delivery. The waste percentages come from somewhere predictable: coverage variants, safety takes, alternates, stock candidates that lost the audition. Once a project is locked, those files have served their purpose and they're never going to serve another one.
The math is in The 5x Rule, and the underlying dataset is in I Analyzed 200 Finished Projects. Run the numbers for your own genre with the calculator before your next storage upgrade.
Where Cleanup Tools Come In
Clip Sweeper handles the post-delivery cleanup by walking timeline references across every project on a drive and identifying which files are used by something, anywhere. Across genres, the unused share lands between 30 and 60 percent of total drive footprint, consistently, regardless of how disciplined the editor is. The shoot ratios are baked in. Storing them forever isn't.