Other forms: footages
Footage is recorded moving pictures, before anybody has edited them. Security footage, raw footage, hours of footage.
It is uncountable — hours of footage, not footages. The word comes from film measured in feet, which is why digital video is still called footage although nothing is measured in feet any more. Common phrases: CCTV footage, drone footage, archive footage, unseen footage. Note that footage also has its literal meaning of a length in feet, used in building and carpeting — square footage.
1nounfootageRecorded moving pictures.
“The news showed dramatic footage of the flood.”
2nounlengthA length measured in feet.
“The square footage on the listing was wrong by about a third.”
footage is recorded material, or a measured length.
Film was sold and measured by the foot, so a quantity of film was its footage. The word survived the disappearance of the medium entirely, which makes it one of the clearest fossils in the language of modern media.
Proto-Indo-European
*ped-
Proto-Indo-European
*pṓds
Proto-Germanic
*fōts
Proto-West Germanic
*fōt
Old English
fōt
Middle English
fot
English
foot
English, today
footage
From foot + -age. Video footage is so called because movie film and television tape was measured in feet. The same term is still applied by analogy to digital videos which are stored on hard drives or microchips. Compare typologically métrage. foot comes from Middle English fot, fote, foot, from Old English fōt, from Proto-West Germanic fōt, from Proto-Germanic fōts, from Proto-Indo-European pṓds. a doublet of pes and pie and pous. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA