A quality video should be a feast for the eyes with with lots of color, movement and emotional appeal that blend together to tell a story. This is why businesses go to video making professionals like the animation studios in singapore to get the perfect video first time. It saves a lot of time and energy for your business. You don’t need to worry about learning how to make a perfect video to promote your services when there are experts out there wanting to do it for you. However, some people want to take the task on themselves.
But when you’re in the beginning stages of your production staring at a blank monitor, how do you come up with the ingredients you need to prepare what will hopefully qualify as a real visual feast? A quality video is the goal! How do you get there? Especially if the assignment is a bit mundane?
All the videos on this page were created with common elements brought together to hopefully be a feast!
In the real world, sticking with the feast analogy, certainly not every video is Thanksgiving. Not every video has that kind of a budget. And let’s face it, some videos are really just audios with pictures. What I mean by that is often, a video producer or editor’s biggest challenge is to concoct visuals to accompany a voice track that has no “real” video to go with it. In the best of all worlds, every video would be creatively driven by compelling, storytelling visuals. Since we’re not, we often have to make it work with much less.
I rescue video projects that suffer from having no video by finding royalty free, generic animations and images that pertains to the broad category. Then, I add some customized graphics.
Like the videos on this page, all of which would fall into the category of generic sales video. A type of video most people want to do! Use the videos on this page as templates.
The videos on this page are a perfect example.
I wanted the finished videos to be something more than a power point presentation with plain graphics, which is so common online, so I added some spectacular royalty free animations.
I try to keep the pace fairly rapid in order to keep the video lively. I changed the animations about every 20 seconds. I changed the words as often as it seemed logical, trying to match the flow. I moved the words on and off the screen with key frame animation of the crop feature.
Since professional video production and editing can be so time consuming (and therefore expensive), it’s always a wise idea to develop little tricks to make you more efficient. One of my tricks is to re-use elements from video to video, just changing minor parameters for the new video. This is usually much faster than creating new elements from scratch,.
If you’re doing a series of videos, whatever visual theme you develop means part #1 can take a long time but subsequent parts are largely a cut and paste affair. Having the elements themselves already created, and only needing minor tweaking saves tons of time.
Efficient producing and editing often involve re-using and re-adapting elements you time-consumingly built for another project. Keeping a good stock pile of video images and graphic elements helps you deliver better and more diversified final products. It’s much easier to grab a few shots out of an old project than it is to re-shoot similar video. In fact, it simply isn’t practical to re-shoot all the time so if you want visually diverse videos, keep good track of file footage.
I hope these suggestions help you make better videos more effectively and efficiently!
Thanks for reading Video Production Tips
Lorraine Grula
Lorraine, I have a video production company in Charlotte, NC. We are always trying to explain to our customers the difference between a video and a picture slideshow. I have been amazed at how much some of my competitors are charging for a photo slideshow. I say shame on them!
Anyway, you are right if the budget calls for a voiceover with just pictures you really do need to animate it with moving text and graphics, otherwise you will completely loose the audience. It’s much better than just a lot of transitioning still pictures!
Beth Sowell
Episode XI Studios
Hi Beth.
Thanks for your great comment. I say shame on them too! A slide show with still pictures should be pretty inexpensive. They are really easy to do. I advice a lot of my customers to use animoto, which is an online automated editing program that makes a fantastic slide show in minutes. Slide shows are a fact of life for video producers because sometimes it is necessary to do it cheap and easy. But let’s be honest and admit it is cheap and easy and charge accordingly! Thanks Beth.
Lorraine, great video!
This is more than a simple slide show. Can I ask how long it takes to put something together like this?
Also, a question about pricing? What would you say would be a resonable amount for someone starting out to charge for this type of service?
Beth, I would interested to know what sort of prices the people you know are charging when you said you were “amazed”?
Many thanks
Mike
Hi Mike.
Great to hear from you. I spent about 6 hours editing this video for Thom. He emailed me the audio track and it was good to go already so I did not have to spend any time looking for music. I created a new project, and began gathering the elements, the animations and backgrounds and so forth. I have a library of stuff already on my computer. Since I edit a lot, I collect them just as a carpenter collects tools.
Once I gathered what I thought was enough into my project, I start playing around with layout. What looks good on the screen and where should it be paced? How many different elements need to be on the screen? How long should they be up there to create a good flow and pacing? To make all those decisions and get everything placed, tweaked and perfected, I am inside Final Cut a good 6 hours start-to-finish. Editing is tedious and time consuming which is something novices just do not usually understand.
Pricing is dependent on so many factors it is hard to advise. A lot of video pros routinely quote a price of $1,000 per finished minute for a video. That would make this video nearly 5 grand. For something this easy and fast, I personally would never charge that much. $1,000-$2,000 seems fair to me. I know others who come in cheap, charge 50 bucks an hour to edit, which would make this $300. That’s slave wage labor fees to me and I won’t work that cheap.
If you add the script writing or having to shoot real video or develop fancy graphics from scratch then the price goes up of course.
I hope this helps!
Thanks
Lorraine
Hi Lorraine,
Thank you for your comprehensive reply.
It’s always good to hear how the professionals carry out projects.
Thanks again
Mike
You are so very welcome Mike! Best of success to you, sir.
Lorraine
Mike, Lorraine is right, a good pricing guideline is to expect to pay $1k per finished minute for video editing, but this isn’t really video, it’s easier than that usually, so I’d only charge the standard $85-95 an hour to edit. The finished product for 6 hours of editing would have been around $600 with encoding time and everything.
Lorraine is correct, editing is very time consuming and tedious. Most people don’t understand that so you have to explain. I’ve had customers think $600 for something like this was too expensive. We have to walk away from those customers.
I have also heard of people paying $2500 for something like this and I think it’s terrible that anyone would charge money like that for a photo slide show with moving graphics and text.
Hi Beth!
Thanks a million for your added comments. I too have had customers who thought professional video production should be super cheap and fast. These are folks who think a ten minute video takes 15 minutes to edit. I agree with you, those are customers you do not need to deal with. Back when I worked as a freelance producer in the Nashville, TN area, I used to refer to those clients as wanting Star Wars in an afternoon for $200. It’s usually impossible to please them. I have tried. At the same time, I knew video companies who acted like they were Steven Speilberg and charged out the ying yang. Geez, those folks drove me nuts too! I remember once bidding against a company like that for a hospital job. I put in a bid of $2,000 and they put in a bid of $20,000. They laughed at me. Literally. Right in my face. They thought I was po-dunk. There can be a lot of snobbery in video production and they thought me doing it all myself had no class! I, of course, thought they were a tad NUTS and very incompetent and inefficient. They were trying to convince the hospital to use a 12-man crew for SURGERY. Good grief. Yeah right, let’s get 3 cameras and 12 crew members in this tiny, STERILE surgical suite. Great idea! I got the job and that hospital became my single best client. Of course the Steven Speilberg wanna-bes just went on and found someone more gullible. Such is the way!
Have a good one.
Lorraine