In an ideal world, you’d spend your days deep in the creative aspects of the video production process.
But, in reality, video production isn’t just about creating the content.
You also need to consider collaborators, budgets and deadlines – not to mention plenty of opinions. As a result, video production can sometimes feel like herding cats.
Creating a defined video production workflow helps bring order to video production chaos. With trusted processes and technology in place, you can deliver consistently brilliant creative. Even on the most hectic projects.
Read on for our need-to-know advice on how to create a smooth video production workflow.
We’ll cover production phases, challenges, tips, plus how cloud video workflows can help you turnaround better video content, faster.
What is a video production workflow?
A video production workflow is a repeatable set of steps that helps streamline your video projects, all the way from the creative brief, through to sign off and distribution.
With lots of moving parts, a defined video collaboration process helps you deliver high-quality video creative – whether it’s for TV, film, ads or social.
Your production workflow acts as a roadmap to keep your project on track. By establishing clear processes, tools and timelines for each stage of the production lifecycle, you can turn in quality content, on time, no matter what hurdles are thrown your way.
In the past, video production processes usually followed a linear, step-by-step approach. But, as we’ll explore in more detail shortly, non-linear cloud video editing is making video workflows a more collaborative affair.
First, let’s look at why creating a defined video workflow is well worth your time.
How a defined video production workflow helps your team
Process and structure aren’t priorities when you’re facing tight deadlines to deliver inspiring video creative.
But if you set up video workflows ahead of time, they’ll save you time, money and a lot of stress. Here’s why.
Manage budgets and deadlines
We all want to focus on creating great content. But most projects are tied to commercial goals.
The problem is, that when budgets and deadlines loom too heavily over video projects, it weighs on the creative process. Creating workflows that include the management of these administrative realities helps turn them into tickbox exercises, rather than creative drains.
Stay on task
Video projects involve multiple people and interweaving tasks. You can’t leave it up to chance that every task is on track.
If one cog in your video production workflow machine isn’t working, the knock-on effect can derail your entire project.
So, having a workflow that gives team members a clear understanding of their responsibilities, as well as providing visibility for team leads that things are going smoothly is essential. Project management tools like Asana, Monday and Adobe Workfront are good places to start.
Explore our recommended video collaboration tools here.
Collaborative freedom
Today’s creative teams often work from different locations. While hybrid or fully remote setups open up collaborative freedom, if there’s no defined workflow they can lead to errors, duplicated efforts and missed deadlines.
Well-defined video workflows provide an underlying structure to support streamlined collaboration – wherever you’re working from.
Creative focus
Whether it’s finding and downloading weighty media files, or jumping on another call, it can feel like you’re constantly being dragged away from the work that matters.
And once interrupted, it takes around 23 minutes to refind your focus. The implications of this go beyond current projects. Breaks in focus add up and start to impact deadlines, productivity and job satisfaction – just ask the team at VERSUS.
