Video Production Techniques - Well Fix It In Post-Production!

In the video production world, the line: "we'll fix it in post," is a common utterance for field crews.

Make a mistake shooting out in the field and it's no big deal, right? After all, we'll just fix it in post.

Post production is where mistakes are corrected, right?

Wrong.

Well, ok, I'll be a little more generous. You CAN fix a lot of mistakes in post but doing so is not cost efficient or time efficient. So for quality video production, you do not want to lean on post production as the crutch phase where mistakes are cleaned up. If you do so, your budget is likely to skyrocket out of control. I promise most clients will not like that

Post production should be a planned, organized procedure that integrates all of your video pieces into a video whole. Many beginners think editing is where you "fix" everything, but editing should not be thought of that way at all. Editing is where you should be assembling your video in a creative way, not struggling to fix mistakes, especially careless ones by field crews who do not appreciate why the line, "we'll fix it in post," is a dreadful way to operate.

Let's put it in perspective from a budget standpoint. Time is money, right? To white balance out in the field before shooting takes about two minutes. But if you forget that two-minute task, then get green video you try and fix in post, you might spend an hour fiddling with it and still end up with crummy looking video. In other words, lots of mistakes are not really that fixable. Even if you can fix it, chances are it will be time consuming to do so. So relying on post production as a mistake-fixing-crutch is an incredibly inefficient and poor way to produce video.

Now let's take fixing shaky video. Several video editing programs now have incredible capabilities that take the shake out of your video. So now we don't have to use tripods, right? Well, fixing shaky video will take HOURS and HOURS of rendering time. So use the feature wisely. If you are videotaping out of a jeep plowing over the African plains videotaping wild lions, then you don't have much of a choice. The very nature of shooting out of a vehicle moving over rough ground is going to give you shaky video and thank goodness you can now correct that.

On the other hand, if your are videotaping captive lions as you walk around the zoo, there is no reason to not use a tripod. Then you have no shakiness to correct.

Post-production is a sloooow process. It can easily take 4-5 hours to edit a 2-3 minute video if that video is at all complicated. Anything that time consuming can get expensive. The last thing you want to deal with in post is a bunch of easily avoidable production mistakes.

I have seen lots of production folks get complacent about this issue. They take it for granted that a mistake in the field is no biggie since good video editing software can correct most mistakes. OK, call me an old curmudgeon if you must, but that is a poor attitude. Do your best to shoot it right in the first place. If, for whatever reason, that is impossible, then you can be grateful that video editing software is available to cover your butt. But a poorly lit shot will never look good, no matter how much you tweak it in post. So please do not rely on editing magic to cover up poor shooting.

Just a bit of advice from a gal who has been making video forever!