Whether you’re filming short-form or long-form video content, there’s a myriad of tasks involved in bringing your creative vision to life. For instance, there’s the pre-production process where you’re mapping everything out. After that, it’s time to head to your location and begin filming all the necessary shots. Then, once you have all your footage, you’ll move into post-production.
As you go into your post-production workflow, it helps to have a clear plan in place to ensure you’re checking off all those final tasks that need to be completed before publishing your video. Luckily, post-production doesn’t have to be stressful or overwhelming. You just need to know what to focus on!
What is Post-Production?
There are three distinct phases of video creation. First, there’s the pre-production phase. This is where you’ll create a storyboard and plan your content. This is your opportunity to get everything prepped and ready for filming. Once you’ve gotten this step taken care of, you’ll be able to move into the production phase where you’re filming all your footage on location.
Post-production is the final stage in creating video content. At this point, you have shot all your footage and now it needs to be edited into your masterpiece. You’ll find yourself making a rough cut of your footage and then fine-tuning it until you get to that final cut. And you’ll add any finishing touches such as music or sound effects and graphics. You may even do some color grading or other more advanced techniques to enhance the overall quality of your video.
What Are the Benefits of a Post-Production Workflow?
Since you likely aren’t planning to upload your raw footage online for all the world to see, there’s no way to skip out on the post-production workflow. Fortunately, this all-important stage offers some great benefits that will make the extra work worthwhile.
It Ensures You Deliver a High-Quality, On-Brand Video
You want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward when it comes to your video content and your post-production workflow allows you to make that happen. This is when you’ll have the chance to fine-tune your video to ensure the image and audio quality are top-notch. After all, it’s crucial that you’re providing viewers with an incredible experience, so they’ll want to watch from start to finish.
You can also use color grading and other graphic elements to make your video match your existing branding. This will create a cohesive look and help your videos become recognizable as being from your unique brand. It’s always a good feeling when someone can differentiate your work from others.
It’ll Help You to Better Drive Home the Message of Your Content
As you create the final cut of your video, you’ll be able to make sure the message you want to get across is clear. You can edit out anything that doesn’t assist in making your point and ditch anything redundant or rambling. Your video should be short, sweet, and direct so you don’t risk viewers dropping off before they make it to the end.
5 Post-Production Workflow Steps for Quality Videos
If you’re not feeling prepared to take on the task by yourself, you can outsource to an experienced production team. However, if you want to keep the job in-house, follow these five steps as part of your post-production workflow:
1. Store and Organize All Raw Footage
Depending on what type of videos you’re filming, you may have amassed a lot of footage during the production stage. After all, long-form content often requires a lot of additional shots. It helps to make time to organize all of this footage so it’ll be easy to find individual shots as needed. It’s also smart to store everything on your hard drive and even have a backup in the cloud just to be safe.
The files within the cloud can be shared with anyone on your post-production team who will need access to them. When all of the files are easily accessible, the job goes much smoother.
2. Begin Creating the Rough Cut
As you begin editing your footage together, don’t feel the need to aim for perfection. Focus on creating a rough cut that you can fine-tune afterward. The goal here should be to create something that resembles the final product and the story you want to tell. You can worry about further edits later.
If you’re part of a larger team and need approval from the higher-ups, send them the rough cut. Give them time to review it and provide notes. Then, consider their feedback as you move into the next step where you’re creating the final cut.
3. Polish it Into the Final Cut
This process may be time-consuming, particularly if you need to go back and forth with your team, making multiple edits. Although it can feel stressful sometimes, it’s worthwhile in the end because we all have a different eye. What someone else on your team notices, you may have overlooked.
Once you have agreed upon a final version of the picture cut, meaning you no longer need to make visual edits, you can focus more on the fine-tuning aspects.
4. Tackle Visual and Sound Effects
Now, it’s time to get your visual effects team into gear! This is when you’ll add any kind of effects your video needs to enhance the content overall. It could be animations, on-screen text, or anything in between. Color grading will also be done during this step, which can be used to evoke a specific feeling or mood, as well as match your existing branding.
Sound effects are another important element of the post-production workflow. You’ll want to make sure the audio is evenly balanced. Should any audio elements need to be re-recorded, this is the time to do it.
5. Do All the Last Fine-Tuning
Once all the previous steps have been completed, you can sit down with your team and review the final cut of the video. This is the perfect opportunity to make any last-minute adjustments before the video is released to the public.
Let the Experts Handle Your Post-Production Workflow
When you’re ready to get serious about creating video content, sometimes the best thing you can do is turn to the experts. Here at NG Production Films, we are pros at every stage of the video production process. And we can help you create incredible videos that attract all the right people to your brand.
Our Orlando Video Production Company, NG Production Films, can communicate effectively and efficiently to produce high-quality video production. We have over a decade of experience to produce the next video production project for your organization. Call NG Production Films today for a free no-obligation consultation at 407-233-3236 or fill out our contact form for a prompt reply.
