There’s a moment on almost every shoot where we call wrap, everyone starts packing down gear, and I can see it on a client’s face, the assumption that we’re basically done. The video’s been filmed. How long can editing take?
I get why people think that. What happens on set is the visible part, the part clients are there for, watching cameras move and directions being given. What happens after is mostly invisible to them, which is exactly why it gets underestimated.
The first thing that happens once we’re back is ingest and backup. Every card gets copied to multiple drives before anything else happens – footage from a shoot day exists nowhere else, and losing it isn’t a risk we’re willing to take, so nothing gets touched until it’s safely backed up in at least two places. Only after that do we start going through what we actually captured.
Selects come next – reviewing every take, every angle, every bit of b-roll, and figuring out what’s usable and what isn’t. For a single day’s shoot, that can easily mean hours of footage to sit through before a single cut is made. Then there’s the assembly edit, which is really just building the skeleton while getting the story roughly in order before any of the fine work starts.
That’s when the actual craft kicks in. Colour grading so footage looks consistent and intentional rather than like six different clips stitched together. Sound design and mixing, which is genuinely underrated – a video with slightly off audio reads as unprofessional even if viewers can’t articulate why. Then there’s music, graphics, titles, any motion work, and usually a couple of rounds of review with the client, each of which takes its own time to implement properly rather than rushed.
None of this is a complaint. It’s just the honest shape of the timeline, and I think clients make better decisions about deadlines, about launch dates, about what’s realistic when they know where the time actually goes. A “quick edit” for a 60-second social clip might genuinely be quick. A brand film with multiple locations, interviews, and a soundtrack that needs to feel considered is a different job entirely, and treating it like the same task as the social clip is where timelines and expectations start to come apart.
When we quote a delivery date, it’s built around this whole process, not just the shoot day. If a deadline’s tight, tell us early – sometimes we can restructure the order things happen in to hit it. What doesn’t work is finding out three days before a launch that the “quick edit” was never going to be quick. We’d rather have that conversation upfront than have you disappointed by a timeline that was never realistic in the first place.
Working to a launch date and need a realistic timeline, not a guess? Get in touch and we’ll map out exactly what’s achievable between now and delivery.