Many of the videos that are supplied to us, or that we film ourselves undergo various levels of video treatment, this is known as the post-production stage. This short guide is written to help you understand how we work, some of the jargon we may use and what you can expect. We cannot document every individual process for each project, but hopefully this guide will assist.
What is post-production?
Post-production is the stage directly after the recording of the content, for both audio and video. We work with both footage we’ve acquired and supplied media too.
The post-production process can be a lengthy process and Storm commonly work on the following categories throughout the development of your video:
Picture Editing – the selection of the right part to use within the video, this involves viewing all the “takes” of a scene, removing any bad bits (mis-recordings, non-shots) and top-and-tailing individual clips for the edit.
We can edit in a variety of ways:
With You – If you would prefer, you can sit with one of the Storm editors to work through the content to build the edit.
From script – if there is a script, we can work to this and select the best ‘takes’ and form an edit from there.
Client Edit – we send you an online preview of all the rushes with an on-screen timecode, and then you can select which clips make it to the edit. This is the most recommended method, as you are the best people to suggest which clips are useable, especially if the video content is particularly specific.
Sound Editing – although the sound is invariably linked to the video, it too goes through a post-production process. This can include some amplification, noise reduction and more advanced treatments to make it sound as good as possible. Sometimes audio is also recorded off-camera, so all the media needs to be linked up and synchronised with the video.
Music and Effects – When appropriate a video can be accompanied with music tracks. Whether it is the latest chart hit or a background score; we can advise you when choosing the right music track for the video.
Colour Correction & Grading – A large amount of the video that Storm produce goes through the colour correction and grading stage. This stage enables the video to look a certain way. For standard townhall or conference filming little grading happens, but there may be quite a bit of colour correction.
Colour Correction really helps the video look its best, for example, offices and places of work frequently have florescent lighting and on-camera this can give video a green colour-cast which is usually invisible to the eye until in post-production. Grading may happen on more creative videos such as interviews, promos or footage for other purposes where we can change the colour depths, offsets and other parameters to give the video a particular mood or feel.
Titles, Graphics & Animation – Most videos require some form of identification either to meet corporate branding guidelines or just to inform the viewer what they’re watching. Titles are either on a background or overlaid on the video, and can be in almost any typeface or style that you’d find in word processing software. We can also make titles crawl and roll, but for more advanced effects skip to the animation section.
Static graphics are excellent visual means that can be inserted into videos to help explain a formula or to demonstrate a diagram. We can design these to spec, or if they are already available these can be inserted from JPEG images, PDF, PowerPoint etc.
Animations are excellent ways of conveying messages, diagrams and graphics in one package, but these don’t need to be stand-alone, as they can be used as part of videos or videos can be used as part of animations!