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Film & Television vocabulary · Editing and Post-Production

Footage

Meaning in film & television, with examples

/ˈfʊtɪdʒ/nounCore term

In film & television, footage means: Recorded film or video material, especially raw material before it has been edited.

In Turkish: görüntü, çekilmiş görüntüler, kayıt

How it is used

Used by editors, documentary makers and news teams: raw footage, archive footage, behind-the-scenes footage, drone footage. Footage is uncountable: some footage, a lot of footage, a clip of footage.

Example sentences

  1. We shot more than eighty hours of footage for a ninety-minute documentary.

  2. The archive footage from 1999 needs to be cleaned before we use it.

Common collocations

  • raw footage
  • archive footage
  • behind-the-scenes footage
  • shoot footage
  • hours of footage
  • dailiesThe raw, unedited footage from a day's shoot, prepared quickly so the director, producers and editor can check it.
  • editingThe work of choosing, ordering and joining shots so that they tell the story with the right rhythm, emotion and meaning.
  • shootTo record a film, scene or shot with a camera. As a noun, a shoot is the period or the day when the filming happens.
  • documentaryA non-fiction film or programme that presents real people, events or places, often to inform, investigate or tell a true story.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Editing and Post-Production

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