How does this work for video though? I remember reading somewhere there is about 3 hours of film shot for every hour of final product. That's more than some might think but not close to 100:1
There is significantly more planning behind video than most still photography. Scenes are story-boarded, shots are carefully set up, lighting is adjusted, etc.
When you look at video that was not carefully planned the ratio of hours shot to hours used goes way up. The Blair Witch Project had a ratio of about 12:1 and while the video from that film was effective it was hardly outstanding from an artistic point of view. Shot-on-location documentaries like Happy People or Welcome to Leith have similar ratios. Even though they're carefully shot, the ad-hoc nature of collecting footage for a film like that makes it necessary to amass a huge amount.
And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.
On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ (http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/)
I dont know what TV editing workflow is like, but 25h doesn't seem outrageous to me. I would budget 2h of edit/mix per song when producing an album. I'm sure there are many who spend way more than that.
When you look at video that was not carefully planned the ratio of hours shot to hours used goes way up. The Blair Witch Project had a ratio of about 12:1 and while the video from that film was effective it was hardly outstanding from an artistic point of view. Shot-on-location documentaries like Happy People or Welcome to Leith have similar ratios. Even though they're carefully shot, the ad-hoc nature of collecting footage for a film like that makes it necessary to amass a huge amount.