webdev Editorial revisions are one of the key stages of video production and certainly one where it pays to take heed of the production company to allow the process to go quickly.
A popular term in the video production industry is “wait and hurry up”. It is very common for a company marketing department or agency to land a project on a video production company with a tight deadline. This is fine and something any decent production company is well drilled to help with. We’ve worked on some insanely tight deadlines, requiring footage to be shot on one continent, sent via Fedex or uploaded to the internet back to the UK and a beautiful video to be produced in days (and sometimes hours!)
Revisions
Naturally after the shoot, there is a process that needs to be followed to allow the video to be refined with the feedback of the client. Editorial changes allow the video to go from an initial rough draft created by the editor to a sleek, finely tuned end result which is pleasing to all stakeholders in the project. The easiest way of going about editorial revisions is for the client to sit in the edit suite with the editor to provide constant feedback as the project takes shape.
This is the ideal situation however. Clients are often busy people and don’t have time spare to sit in a darkened edit suite with the editors. Editors frequently don’t have the best client facing skills and can be grumpy! (I’m allowed to say that because I’m an editor as well as producer!). Also the stakeholders will want their feedback so having only one person sitting in isn’t always ideal.
The alternative is for the editor to create a first draft on their own and upload the result to the cloud or a video streaming website like the wonderful Vimeo. Once this is there, the client can give their feedback and start refining the video this way. A couple of points we recommend clients heed when working in this way.
Correlate feedback
A difficulty we have from time to time is multiple stakeholders giving their feedback in different emails (or even worse on the phone) without referencing other people’s feedback on the same draft. This can cause a lot of head aches for the editor (making them even more grumpy) if one set of feedback contradicts another. We highly recommend that a primary stakeholder correlates the feedback onto one document to send to the editor, saving tempers all around.
Time codes
Another newbie error is to give feedback or ask for sections of the video to be removed or moved without any kind of time reference. It can be very tricky for the editor to know what the client means when they say “take out the bit about kidney dialysis” when the whole video might be about that subject.! It is far easier and more exacting to reference a time code eg.
00:34-01:12 Remove the reference to dialysis for people with a pre-existing kidney condition
These steps will make the revision process a lot more straight forward and make sure the entire post production process flies by with the minimum hair pulling possible.
Luke
