Being rather new to football, I was surprised to see a guy with an Arriflex SRIII on the sidelines. I hadn’t realized that anyone was still shooting 16mm film; I thought it was all video. My friend told me that the 16mm film is used for highlight shows, which I have since seen.
I’d calculate that a cameraman shooting every play would require six magazines (2,400 feet) of film. But many of the highlight sequences are in slo-mo, which means the feet shot per second is greater. And I would guess that there might be at least a few short ends so that the cameraman doesn’t roll out during a play.
Is there more than one film cameraman? How many feet of 16mm film is shot during a typical game?
I think BobT is correct, the guys you see running the Arriflex cameras are Steve Sabol’s crew. They are justifiably proud of their commitment to film in this video age, and according to the Flash-heavy NFL Films media relations site (click the “Fast Facts” link) they shoot 1,000 miles of 16mm film per season… so figure, say 16 games a week in a 16 week season… that comes out to just a shade under 4 miles (or 21120 feet) of film per game* (and an uncanny number of 16’s per sentence).
That number is certainly smaller when you figure in post-game interviews, practice sessions, pre-game tailgating, not to mention the post-season games themselves, but it’s a decent ballpark figure.
I did the math and (assuming a 3 hour game) came up with a single-camera figure of ~2 feet of film per second… how many 16mm frames does that represent? Google shows the Arriflex SR3 to run at 5-75fps, so this could give you an idea of how many cameras they use versus what frame rates they shoot.
One foot of 16mm film is 40 frames. The normal frame rate for film in the U.S. is 24 frames per second. However, there are other rates that may be used to more closely match the television refresh rate (e.g. 23.976, 29.970 or 30 fps). And there are the slo-mo shots at whatever rate they use.
figure.