Post-production

Post-production starts the day the cards come off the camera and onto a drive. The editor builds a rough cut, the skeleton without colour or music. Then come sound, colour grading, graphics, subtitles, and finally exports for YouTube, LinkedIn and Reels. Three to five people touch a single video. Most of them never meet the client, though they decide how the film turns out.

After a two day conference we had eight hours of material and a client who wanted the aftermovie by Friday. The shoot took two days, post-production took nine. This is the number missing from most campaign plans: post-production usually runs two to three times the shooting time and eats a matching share of the budget.

The sequence is always the same: rough cut for comments, one round of revisions, then sound and colour, then the master. From you we need logos as vectors, the correct spelling of names, and licensed music or approval to use ours. A standard corporate video spends two to three weeks in post-production including approvals. We count the delivery date from the last comment, not from the shoot.

The expensive part of post-production is not the work, it is changing your mind. Reorder the blocks after the rough cut is approved and sound, graphics and colour all fall apart and start again. Agree the number of revision rounds up front. Where that is not written down, one side always pays for it.

We deliberately send the first rough cut without music and without colour. That way you watch the structure of the story rather than the polish. Comments come back in one document with timecodes, never scattered across five emails. Ask any studio to work this way and you will save a week.