It's All In The Planning

Some people are experienced project managers and have been to the video production rodeo before.

If you're new to the process, we hope this information helps you plan ahead.

It's said that every five minutes spent on pre-production planning will save you an hour on location. While we're not sure how the math works out on that equation, we do know from experience that a little bit of pre-pro can go a long way.

Project Planning

When you plan a video project, the first thing to do is ask yourself some questions. Here are some we always ask:

  1. Who is your target audience?
  2. What message(s) do you want to convey?
  3. What is the purpose of your video?
  4. What visual and graphical elements do you want to show?
  5. Where do we have to travel to get these elements?
  6. How many minutes do you think the video should run?
  7. What is the estimated shelf life of your video?
  8. Who will be the subject matter expert on this video?
  9. Who will be approving the scripts and offline edits?
  10. What is your deadline?
  11. What is driving your deadline?
  12. How much do you have budgeted to spend on your video?
  13. Can we re-purpose video elements for other uses- like a company web-site?
  14. When do you want us to start?

People often ask us, "How long does it take to make a video?" The answer is usually, "That depends on all the factors involved." To get an idea of the steps involved in producing a video, download and read the document available when you click on the button below. It even includes a flow chart for you engineers.

download a whitepaper on the production process

Scripting is the most important part of the process. The amount of time the script development process takes can vary. Once you have an approved script, things are more predictable.

People also ask us, "How long will it take to shoot my video?" That question is a bit easier to answer, especially with a completed script. Here's the formula-- take the number of shots and multiply that number by 20 minutes, to get an approximate time.

For example, if you have 30 shots, plan on each shot taking 20 minutes to capture, so your shoot should take about 10 hours. If 20 minutes seems like a long time, just remember there are lights to set up, microphones to plug in, camera moves to practice, and bloopers to discard. Not every shot will take this long to capture on tape, but some might take a lot longer than you think.

Once your footage is shot, it has to be edited together. A good rule of thumb for the editing process is one to two hours per running minute of video. For example, if your video is 5 minutes long, it should take 5 to 10 hours to edit. Of course if the video has lots of motion graphics and special effects, it could take even longer. Or if the video is mostly a person sitting in a chair and talking to the viewer it could take only 2 or 3 hours.