Most companies shoot one production day a year and publish exactly one video from it. Everything else, hours of footage you already paid for, sits on a drive and nobody opens it again. Below is the system we use for labelling footage, what one shoot day can realistically produce, and how to turn an archive into twelve months of content.
Key takeaways
- One shoot day can carry a main video, six to eight short formats and a year of B roll. The second wave costs a fraction of the shoot itself.
- According to Wistia's State of Video 2026 report, based on a survey of more than 900 professionals and data from over 13 million videos, more than half of teams already cut social clips from existing video.
- Labelling matters more than editing. Without named folders and shoot notes, finding one specific shot six months later takes longer than filming it again.
- Plan for three aspect ratios: 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1. In the same report, 76 % of teams adjust aspect ratios per platform.
- Repurposing is not always the answer. If your logo, product or the person on camera has changed, the archive becomes a liability instead of a saving.
Why does most footage end up sitting on a drive?
Because a shoot is bought as a project, not as a supply. The brief says one video, the budget says one video, and once it is delivered the project closes. Everything that did not fit has no owner and no deadline, so it gets archived.
The ratio is almost comic. A two minute company video usually comes from 60 to 120 minutes of usable footage. Two minutes make the final cut, so roughly two to three percent. The rest is not waste: it is interviews, close ups of hands at work, shots of the floor that you would otherwise pay to film again next year.
The second reason is more mundane. Nobody knows what is on the drive. When a marketer asks eight months later whether there is a close up of the assembly line, the answer "probably, let me look" means two hours of scrubbing, and it usually ends with nobody looking at all.
How should you label footage so you can find it a year later?
You need three things: consistent folder names, notes written during the shoot, and one list of selected shots. Nothing else, and no expensive software.
This is how we run it, and you are welcome to copy it:
- Project folder:
2026-08-24_client_project. Date first so it sorts itself. Always the same subfolders inside:01_RAW,02_AUDIO,03_SELECTS,04_EXPORT. - Shoot notes: one text file written during the day. One line per setup: timecode, what was filmed, who is in frame, whether the sound is usable. It costs an assistant twenty minutes across a full day.
- Selects: after the shoot, watch the material once and pull 30 to 50 of the best sections into
03_SELECTSwith descriptive names, for exampleportrait-tom-smile-closeup.mp4. This is the only extra step, about two hours, and it saves time for a whole year. - Three words per file name: who, what, type of shot. Nobody remembers more, and nobody can search for less.
If you work with a production studio, ask for these selects as part of delivery. We hand them over by default even when a client does not ask, because we know the question "do you happen to have a shot where..." always arrives eventually.
What can one shoot day realistically produce?
From a single day with a crew of two or three, you can build a main video of two to three minutes, six to eight short vertical cuts, two or three interview segments for LinkedIn, a set of stills pulled from the video, and a stock of footage for later.
Here is what that costs. A shoot day including the edit of the main video runs from 2 500 to 4 500 euros depending on complexity. The second wave, eight short formats cut from existing footage, costs 600 to 1 200 euros, because there is no prep, no crew and no gear to pay for. Filming those shorts separately would cost you roughly three times that.
Two things decide more than the edit itself. The first is aspect ratio: material shot wide has to be reframed, not cropped blindly. The second is captions, because a large share of viewers watch on mute, which we covered separately in our piece on video captions. Which lengths and formats work on which network is broken down in our guide to social media video formats.
How do you turn an archive into a twelve month plan?
Do not sort the footage by what looks nice. Sort it by the question it answers, then spread it across the months.
The process we run with clients:
- Step 1: write down twelve questions your customers actually ask. Questions, not topics.
- Step 2: match each question with footage you already own. You will find you have material for seven of them and nothing for five.
- Step 3: queue those five and film them together in one day six months from now. That is how a supply gets built instead of a fire drill.
- Step 4: publish one larger video and two short cuts per month. Push more than that out of one shoot and it starts to repeat itself.
If you want the wider numbers behind this, Wistia's video marketing statistics report is the most useful annual read we know of on how teams actually distribute video.
When is repurposing video not worth it?
Three situations where the archive hurts you, and it is fair to say them out loud even though there is no work in it for us.
The visual identity changed. New logo, new colours, new website. Old footage carrying the previous branding reads as a mistake, and people notice faster than you would expect.
The person on camera left. With interviews tied to named employees, this is the most common reason material ages within months. The fix is boring but effective: film most shots without name tags or named references.
The footage is more than two years old. Not because of image quality, but because of details. Clothing, monitors, cars in the car park, the office interior. Viewers cannot say what feels off, but they feel the video is not from this year.
In those cases a new shoot is cheaper than rescuing old material in post production. We have been there ourselves: on one project we spent two days trying to squeeze a campaign out of a two year old archive, then told the client to drop it and shoot a new half day instead. It came out cheaper and better.
Frequently asked questions
How long is a video archive worth keeping?
Footage stays practically usable for about two years, but keep the files for five. Older shots become useful for anniversaries, company history segments and before and after comparisons, where their age is an advantage rather than a flaw.
Who should manage the archive, us or the production company?
The production company should hold the originals, because it has the storage and the backups, but you need your own copy of the selects. If you change suppliers and the only copy sits with the old one, you lose everything you paid for.
What does a second wave of edits cost?
With us, 600 to 1 200 euros for a set of six to eight short videos including captions and three aspect ratios. The main variable is whether selects exist. If someone has to watch all the raw footage first, add several hours of work.
Can old 1080p footage still be used?
Yes, on social platforms it is fine, since everything gets compressed there anyway. The problem starts when you want to crop or reframe into vertical, because that costs you resolution. This is why shooting in 4K pays off even when the deliverable is Full HD.
If you have last year's shoot sitting on a drive and no idea what to do with it, send us a link through the contact form. We will also tell you if we think filming fresh is the better call. How we run shoots and what we hand over is described in our video production section.
