What is Involved in the Video Post-Production Process?

The post-production process of a video project is often the most underrated stage in video production. As the final stage in every video production, it requires a lot of expertise to arrive at a great video. This phase involves editing the video components shot, adding new elements, and finally polishing the video until it is ready to be shared.

This article will guide you in flawlessly executing a video editing and production phase perfectly. If you are new to the post-production process or want to learn more, this article is for you; keep reading.

What Is a Post-Production Process?

Post-production is the final stage of video production. Post-production involves:

• Editing the raw footage you shoot.
• Assembling the footage in an engaging way.
• Adding sounds, visuals, and other effects.

This stage requires professionals such as sound engineers, colorists, editors, foley artists, and more. This process can take longer than other stages depending on the size of the video project and its estimated budget.

Steps Involved in The Post-Production Process

Here is what’s involved in the post-production process:

Storing and Organizing Raw Footage

This step of the process depends on how you receive the footage. Receiving the raw footage daily is primarily standard among longer video projects and the other form of collection for shorter video projects. Work starts at post-production when the raw footage starts coming into the editors.

This is one of the most neglected steps in post-production. It can cost you a lot of wasted hours and money during the project if it’s handled improperly. It’s crucial that when your post-production team receives footage, it must be tagged, organized, and stored correctly, so it can be found and retrieved quickly when it’s needed.

You can achieve this by using a personal drive coupled with a backup or uploading it on a cloud drive or shared networks, so your team can work on it. The camera crew can also deliver a shot log with the footage, as this will help the editors organize and catalog the clips correctly. This way, the editor will know what shot was meant for a scene.

Develop the Rough Cut

This task is for the video editor and production team. As soon as all the clips are received, cataloged, organized, and stored, the next step will be to develop the first arrangement of the video. This arrangement portrays what the video content should look like, and it’s often done with the video director providing the video script.

Check the Notes/Script and Refine the Rough Cut

Once you have made the first arrangement of the raw footage, it gets transferred to the project’s video director, producers, and director to get their editing notes on the cut. The video editor then uses these editing notes to make a refined version of the video edit. This process can take a long while, as directors and editors can keep going back and forth on the notes and re-edit until they agree on a final cut. This means there will be no more visual or footage edits.

Visual Effects

After making a final cut, the visual team adds some visual effects to the final video project. This step includes adding virtual words, animations, or birds. The visual team will also make color corrections to give the video project a certain aesthetic. Once the visual team has added the necessary motion graphics and color grades, the next step is to add sounds to the video.

Sound Effects

The sound editor will now continue the post-production process by handling and ensuring that the conversation, foley, and other valuable components are balanced rightly in the final video mix.

You can also get composers to build a musical for the project, while foley artists will create an array of sounds (footsteps, the rush of wind, etc.) they didn’t record in the course of producing the video.

Final Clearance and Refining

This is the approval and fine-tuning stage, where all the project decision-makers sit down and make final notes. This process does not involve a lot of edits like the previous steps; it just involves small refining.

Distribution

This is the final step in the post-production stage. Marketing and distribution start once approval has been given and the final video project is ready to be shared.

Conclusion

As technology continues evolving, post-production techniques evolve alongside them. While these steps may change in some ways, these are the primary steps for the post-production process. Hopefully, this guide on the post-production process will help you run this final stage efficiently and allow you to work with your post-production team effectively.