In 2023, there's no slowing down for video production. Today, nearly 86% of businesses use video assets in their creative campaigns, and it’s easy to see why.
Among our own user base, video assets are the second most common asset type uploaded and reviewed by creative teams in our platform.
But video production involves multiple players on different teams, juggling deadlines, managing budgets, and ideally sticking to what are often tight turnaround schedules. With all of these elements in the mix, an efficient pre-production and post-production video workflow can keep all these moving parts together.
These same complexities also make building and enforcing a consistent production, editing and video post-production workflow across team members difficult.
Whether you're an agency specializing in video, an enterprise brand looking to create more in-house video assets or a freelance video producer, this guide will give you a video production workflow that will enable you to produce and approve quality video content faster, every time.
Review and approval of video projects can get complicated fast without the right workflow in place. There are many moving parts involved, and if you're not careful, they can quickly become a tangled, expensive mess--especially when multiple revisions are required.
A video production workflow is a series of sequential steps carried out based on a set of pre-defined rules or conditions to execute this process.
Video production workflows combine video project documentation and planning, review and approval, and file and asset management under one umbrella. A well-defined workflow provides guardrails that ensure that certain production steps only begin after project criteria and approvals are met and provides a predictable flow from pre- to post- production.
Having an automated workflow in place is especially important during video post-production when video content goes through many different cuts and versions, requires review by many stakeholders, and often needs to simultaneously exported in many different formats, lengths, and codecs for distribution and marketing across social, YouTube, traditional broadcast, and many other channels. That’s a lot of content creation and versioning for a video team to keep track of and for marketing/advertising teams to launch simultaneously.
Furthermore, even though video production is complex, video production timelines are getting tighter as video campaigns require rapid distribution across social media and other on-demand content platforms.
To meet these challenges, brands and video production teams need a systematic, predictable workflow to manage resources and moving parts efficiently, keep projects on track with milestones and deadlines, and hold individual contributors accountable.
There’s a clear benefit to implementing workflow for video production.
When we analyzed the behavior of collaborators and video teams using our platform to review and approve video content, we found that automation provided key benefits to video teams:
Why does workflow contribute to such a dramatic improvement in delivery timelines even when more contributors and decision steps are involved?
Ultimately, video production workflows can help video productions and marketing teams control who sees video content, and when. This means that collaboration can be more precise, timely, and relevant to each specific stage of production: the gold standard for busy video teams that need to get videos shot/created, edited, and delivered quickly.
Even if more people are involved in the process, workflow can eliminate the common collaboration roadblocks that delay production: reworking final videos based on late feedback or issues that should have been addressed in pre-production, demonstrating a history of approval across stakeholders, and ensuring that production steps or edits only begin once all campaign planning and assets have final sign-off.
Here are some examples of how workflows set the stage for success:
Additional, video production workflows are essential for maintaining consistency and brand compliance. Today’s audiences expect consistent storytelling and branding from companies, across all communication channels. Having a predefined video editing workflow provides brands with a set of standards in place to maintain a through-line between all videos, ensuring they fit in with the broader narrative of you or your client’s mission, values, and origin story.
Before you get started on pre-production, you’ll need to establish a plan. Having a clear strategy ensures ensure your video content aligns with overall business or project goals.
Set clear goals, understand your audience, and decide which formats and distribution channels to include in your video production campaign.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Every video you produce should link back to the big picture. Consider how each video will work for your business in the long term.
For example, producing an ongoing series might help position your brand as a go-to resource in your niche while creating video ad campaigns might help you drive more conversions, and thus generate more revenue.
Keep in mind, goals like “increasing brand awareness” or engagement can sometimes be difficult to measure, so you may need to take some time to consider what metrics will help you determine whether your video content is successful or not. This can include total video views and shares, brand reach, any sales or new customer acquisition attributed to a video campaign, and more.
Having a clear goal for each video campaign makes it easier to determine the messaging, visual assets, and budget required to produce the video.
The pre-production stage is critical. This is where you’ll lay the foundation for your video and create a reference point for project scope and deliverables to keep everyone on track.
Key steps:
These requirements should be outlined in both the creative brief and production schedule. It’s critical that these details are reviewed and approved before work begins.
Leveraging intake forms can help start the pre-production brief process and keep video projects organized from the beginning. These forms can capture client or project requirements, transform them into a video brief, and automatically send it to both your video editing team and other internal stakeholders for review so everyone is on the page. This also creates one system of record for the project before any video files are created.
During the production stage, things start to come together. Here, you’ll create the raw footage for the video. You’ll want to make sure that everything is in place, or else you’ll end up having to schedule pick-up shoots or spend more time on re-editing and revisions in post-production because someone forgot a key element. Production should include:
We recommend uploading and maintaining these related assets in one central repository and use automated notifications to inform your marketing and social media team that new promotional assets are available for review and use. You’ll want to store all of these promotional assets and short clips alongside the files of the finished product for a complete campaign portfolio.
Within creative campaigns, video projects only have an average of 2-3 versions before a final cut is done. Yet, these types of creative projects tend to have the longest turnaround time due to post-production editing.
Post-production takes all the raw film footage and sound recordings and brings everything together into a cohesive unit. At this stage, the video goes through a collaborative editing process and may involve a few rounds of editing. An efficient post-production workflow is an essential tool for ensuring that everyone communicates effectively, stays focused on project scope, and delivers the final video on time (or possibly even faster.)
Make sure editors and project managers have the right tools at their disposal, as it can make a huge difference when it comes to delivering the final project on time.
Key steps:
Finally, you’ll need to put together a workflow for distributing and promoting the final project. While promotion will vary based on your content strategy and the goals associated with a project, workflows often include the following steps.
Traditionally, video has been dominated by standard codes. However, today, we’re seeing an explosion in the variety of standardizations in videos are created and reviewed. Instead of just using H.264 codec wrapped into an MP4 format, the same video content needs to be produced--and reviewed and approved--for a number of different channels and different optimizations simultaneously. Instagram content, for instance, may need to be trimmed down and broken into a series of short clips, whereas you might upload the entire video to YouTube.
Now, you’ll want to ensure that the same video file can be automatically transcoded and rendered for different formats quickly and that all those formats are reviewed, approved, and stored together as part of the same project structure internally.
Video production can involve so many decision-makers spread across different locations and skill sets. Different stakeholders and teams need to provide input and expertise at different stages of video creation.
With such a large team working on complex projects, setting repeatable processes at each stage of your video production workflow will ensure that your project hits deadlines, gets in front of the right people at the right time, and moves through the production line fast.
Key guardrails to put in place include:
Automating these guardrails helps standardize the cadence of video production and reduces confusion around roles, responsibilities, approvals, and project expectations across teams. It speeds up production review processes, keeps assets organized, and helps eliminate human error. Ultimately, this gives your video editing team more time to focus on creating quality content, not clarifying or tracking down feedback.
Plus, the time savings from automating these administrative tasks of video production can really add up.
When we analyzed video review activity among our users, we discovered that video projects that used these automated guardrails had faster project approvals and faster delivery timelines even if they had 2-3x times the amount of versions, comments, or stakeholders providing feedback and decisions.
With a video production workflow in place, more changes and more eyeballs on files in post-production does not create more delays in getting to a final cut.
In fact, it can shorten video delivery timelines significantly even when the collaboration process appears more complex. An automated review workflow helps act as a buffer that can absorb the complexity of video project collaboration.
Projects can quickly devolve into chaos without the right leader. Designate a production manager to ensure that your video production workflows stay on the right track.
For more complex processes, you may need to assign a project manager for each stage—pre-production, production, post-production, and promotion—as each of these areas requires different expertise.
This person should be a strong communicator that can delegate tasks and keep workers on track. This becomes especially important when you are coordinating efforts with freelancers or contractors working on their own schedules. A project manager can keep each contributor in the loop, providing guidance, resources, and a set of clear expectations to ensure consistency across distributed teams.
Video production involves so many moving parts that losing track of details sometimes seems inevitable.
One of the biggest challenges for video producers is gathering and implementing feedback on new video versions in post-production. To give stakeholders access to new versions for review, video editors need to export files and upload them to shared folders or another hosting system like Vimeo. With this process, any changes live outside of the native video files and completing feedback can be difficult or time-consuming to correlate across many communication channels.
As such, you’ll want to establish a centralized hub for storing and collaborating on all video project files and related documentation.
This hub should live outside of your video editing system and be an accessible point of reference for project files and project status for everyone involved in the video project. Within this project space, collaborators should also be able to work with and markup video files in a way that streamlines feedback for the editing team.
Helpful post-production review tools include:
No matter how complicated things get, keeping video file storage and the advanced video project markups and changes in the same system is imperative for a smooth production process.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that you use a cloud-based solution that syncs updates and uploads in real-time so that everyone has access to the latest information. This is especially important when collaborators and editors are working remotely from different locations or on set.
Once accurate feedback has been indicated by stakeholders, it’s helpful if your video editing team can then see and implement those changes directly in their editing bay.
Implementing a video production workflow that integrates review and approval tools directly within an editing system like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro allows your video production team to feedback right away, understand where changes apply, and get new versions out the door faster.
Hallmarks of an integrated production workflow for editing include the ability to:
Here's an example how video editors can integrate their video editing work in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects with video review and approval from multiple stakeholders:
Beyond storing project materials in a central location, you’ll also need to establish a naming convention for all files and a system for keeping them organized.
Naming conventions might look like this:
Your system might look something like this:
How you arrange your files is up to you. The important thing here is that all stakeholders know exactly where and how to find what they need to complete their work and the latest version of a video file.
It’s also worth noting that many content management systems come with the option to set controls that can automatically ensure files are named and stored according to brand standards.
This ensures that different people don’t use different naming conventions or organization methods. This can lead to double work and different versions of the same project.
The video production process can get overwhelming fast. With the right production workflow in place, you’ll have a system for breaking these complex projects into digestible tasks with clear deadlines and expectation to guide contributors through each stage.
We hope the tips outlined above help you get started on your own video production workflow and ensure that every video you produce is high-quality, on-budget, and in line with your brand guidelines.
While setting up the perfect workflow does take some time, the upfront investment stands to be one of the best things you can do for your video content strategy.
Creative collaboration solutions like Ziflow allow video teams to easily collect feedback on complex video projects and versions, track project status, and more. The platform integrates video editing with team-wide approval decisions, so team members can submit decisions when video cuts are ready for review and everyone remains on the same page about the status of video projects.