How to Make Great Video Content

Making top quality video content isn’t as easy as it seems. You need to balance the light, sound, positioning of cameras, lights and microphones… And that’s before we get to the actions of the people and things that are seen on-screen. It’s a lot to manage, and that’s why many companies use a video production contact of some sort - be it a freelancer or a video production agency to help them create their video-based content.

That said, as with all things some video production contacts are better than others. One thing that I seem to notice in the good ones that i’ve seen however is that they all have a structure to the way they work. There are defined processes and steps within those processes which are worked through. Video production is of course no different in that regard, and in this case the four stages that a video production contact should work through are as follows:

• Pre-production (laying the groundwork for your production)

• Production (actually shooting the footage you need)

• Post Production (editing, colour balancing, sound balancing etc.)

• Distribution (getting your video out there to potential audiences)

1: Pre Production

When a client asks for a build in sequence a video production contact should ask what he is looking for exactly - since the more detail a video production contact can get about what their client expects from the project, the more likely they are to be able to meet those expectations. This information needs to be gathered before production starts. The idea is that no matter what may happen on a shoot, a video production contact should be able to say to the client, "Don’t worry, we have a plan".

2. Production.

Quite logically, production is what your video production contact should move on to once they’ve finished the pre-production phase, and instead of planning what they’re going to do, it’s where your partner actually starts work on the video proper - capturing footage, working with models, extras etc. Just like in the movies, a good video production contact should be capturing each scene or shot multiple times in order to give them more alternatives in the editing phase that comes next.

3. Post Production.

It’s wise for your video production contact to have video editing software - it’s expected that editing will be done via computer in today’s industry - and the equipment involved in today’s video editing software usually includes a D2V or a Dell. It’s very smart to work this way as there will be many times that a producer will require to edit out only selective portions of footage.

In order to get a good, round-field color balance, what you will want to use is a Dstatic sampler or a Diebel sampler which features 2- Channel, 16-channel color separation software and an 8GB capacity of creative data. If you’re shooting on a small budget, use a web-encoder or a royalty free D16 channel software clipped which does not have a large learning curve as the software is user friendly.

Don’t forget that shooting a video and post production are two separate things - any good video production contact should be able to tell you that -  and as such they’re quite different from each other. Post production might be seen as an afterthought because it doesn't involve cameras and actors and so on - but if they know what they’re talking about, your video production contact should tell you that’s a mistake, too.

4.Distribution

The job of producing a video is only part of the job though, you also need to get your end product out to the people that will want to see it, and again this is a somewhat separate process. A good video production contact will be able to shot for a number of different format, resolutions and sizes so you will be able to use almost any channel that works well within your niche, be it TV, social media, youtube, or something else.