Avoid hidden costs of video production
A production company comes in. They give you a pitch. It sounds pretty good. They name you a number, and it's considerably lower than the other companies you've met with. That should seal the deal, shouldn't it? In reality, you need to look carefully at what is behind a production company's approach to production and post production, and see what sort of approaches they have taken in the past. You can begin by asking these questions:
What is their backup plan?
We all hope for productions to go flawlessly, but sometimes mother nature and other factors foil even the most well laid plans. What is a production company's backup plan? What redundancies do they have in place for equipment, crew and data protection? What sort of incidents does their insurance cover? It might sound great that your friend from college knows a young man with a nice camera and a laptop and he will do your work for half the price of an established company, but what will that cost you in the long run if something goes wrong? Which brings us to the next question:
How do you avoid having to fix it in post?
There is an entire sub-industry in the visual effects world based completely on film crews not getting what they want on the day and bringing in post talent to paint out, replace, re-color and in other ways "fix" things that could have been done right the first time. This is great for VFX artists, but it costs clients quite a bit, and those costs might not have been known up front when the job was originally pitched. Finding examples of work methods your production company has employed to avoid adding hidden costs in post is a great measure to consider when choosing your next video or film production service.
