Production Guide
The crew wraps, the gear goes back in the cases, and you go back to your day job. Two weeks later you have a video. What happened in between?
Most clients have only a vague sense of what post-production involves. This matters more than it might seem, because misunderstanding the process is the most common reason client-production company relationships get strained. Unrealistic timeline expectations, revision requests that restart work already completed, and feedback that comes in the wrong format at the wrong stage — all of these stem from not knowing what post actually is and how it works.
Here is a clear explanation of what happens after the shoot.
The first step is ingesting and organizing the footage. Every card from every camera gets offloaded, backed up to at least two drives, and labeled. On a multi-camera shoot, this can be hundreds of gigabytes of material. The editor then syncs the cameras — matching the audio and video from multiple sources so they line up correctly on the timeline.
Then the actual editing begins. The editor watches everything — every take, every angle, every piece of B-roll — and selects the best material. For a two-minute corporate overview with an interview and B-roll, this selection process often takes longer than the edit itself. You cannot build a good edit from bad selects, and making the right choices at this stage determines the ceiling on everything that follows.
The assembly cut is the rough version: the right content in roughly the right order, with the story logic in place but none of the polish. Most clients never see this. They see the first cut, which is the editor's best version after refining the assembly.
A realistic editing timeline for a standard corporate piece — two to four minutes, single interview, B-roll — is three to five business days from when the editor starts. That does not include ingesting, syncing, or waiting for assets (music, graphics, additional footage). If the project has multiple interviews, multiple locations, scripted narration, or complex structure, add time proportionally.
Color grading is the process of adjusting the look of the footage: exposure, contrast, color balance, skin tones, and stylistic treatment. It is not just fixing problems — it is a creative decision about how the finished piece looks.
Professional cameras like the Sony FX9 and FX6 record in a flat, low-contrast color profile called a log format (S-Log3 on Sony cameras). This maximizes the dynamic range captured by the sensor — the camera holds detail in both the bright sky and the dark shadows simultaneously. But log footage looks washed out and grey right out of the camera. The color grade is where that raw material gets transformed into the polished, contrasty, color-accurate image you see in the final video.
A good color grade serves two purposes. First, it makes every shot look its best individually. Second, it makes every shot match every other shot, so a cut from one camera angle to another doesn't visually jar the viewer. Two cameras on the same subject from different angles will have subtly different exposures, white balances, and color casts. The grade brings them together.
On a standard corporate production, color takes a few hours to a full day depending on the complexity of the piece and the number of locations. High-end commercial work and brand films get more extensive treatment. Internal communications and simple interview pieces get a lighter pass.
The audio mix is where all the sound elements of the video get balanced and polished. This includes the dialogue, the music, and any sound effects or ambient sound.
Dialogue cleanup comes first. Even well-captured audio has issues: a slight hum from a light fixture, a moment where one speaker's level drops, a breath that's too prominent, a word where clothing noise competes with the voice. The audio engineer works through the dialogue track and addresses these issues using EQ, compression, noise reduction, and level automation.
Then the music gets placed and balanced. This is more nuanced than it sounds. Music that is too loud makes the speaker hard to understand. Music that is too quiet doesn't serve its emotional purpose. The music also needs to duck (reduce in volume) smoothly when the speaker is talking and come back up during B-roll. Getting this right requires listening to the whole piece multiple times and making small adjustments.
The final step is checking levels against broadcast or delivery standards. Different platforms have different loudness specifications. YouTube, broadcast television, streaming platforms, and corporate AV systems all have different target loudness levels. Delivering at the wrong level means your video is either too quiet or aggressively loud compared to everything around it. A professional audio mix is delivered at the correct loudness specification for the platform.
Most corporate videos include some graphics: lower thirds (the text boxes that identify speakers by name and title), title cards, logo animations, and sometimes charts or data visualizations.
Lower thirds are the element that most often cause delays. The information needs to be confirmed correct — names spelled properly, titles accurate, company name in the right format — before they get built. Every time a lower third gets rebuilt because the title changed or the name was wrong, that is time added to the post schedule. Send the complete, confirmed list of lower third information to your production company before post begins. This is one of the most concrete things a client can do to prevent post-production delays.
Motion graphics for more complex elements — animated logos, data visualizations, custom title sequences — take longer and should be scoped explicitly in the project estimate. A complex opening title sequence is a separate deliverable that can take as long as the edit itself.
This is where most client-production relationships either work well or break down. Understanding how revision rounds work — and why they need to work a specific way — will save you time and frustration.
When you receive a cut for review, you are receiving a specific version of the edit at a specific point in the post workflow. The editor has made hundreds of decisions to produce what you are watching. Your feedback needs to be comprehensive and consolidated from all stakeholders before it is delivered back to the editor.
Here is what goes wrong most often: a client watches the first cut, sends feedback. The editor makes those changes and delivers a second cut. A different stakeholder watches the second cut for the first time and sends a new round of feedback that conflicts with some of the first round. The editor has to partially undo work they already did.
The way to avoid this is simple but requires discipline: everyone who has approval authority watches each cut before feedback is sent. All feedback gets consolidated into one document. The editor receives one set of notes, not a stream of individual emails from different people.
Most production contracts include two or three revision rounds. A revision round means one consolidated set of feedback and one resulting new cut. Changes that expand the scope of the edit — adding new footage that wasn't shot, restructuring the piece entirely, replacing the music with a different track that requires a full re-edit of the B-roll timing — are scope changes, not revisions. These are handled as additional work.
When the edit is approved, the video gets exported in whatever formats were specified in the brief. A broadcast master at full resolution, a compressed version for web upload, and a social media cut at the right dimensions and length are common deliverables that come from the same approved edit.
Confirm your delivery requirements before post begins, not after. The wrong codec, frame rate, or resolution for your destination platform is a problem that requires a re-export at minimum and sometimes a partial re-edit. If your video is going to a broadcast network, a streaming platform, a corporate video wall, and your website, all four of those have different technical requirements. A professional production company will ask about this in pre-production. If they don't, you should raise it.
Mr. Camera handles post-production for corporate and broadcast clients in Las Vegas across all delivery formats. If you have a project in pre-production and want to talk through the post workflow and timeline, get in touch here.
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