If you’ve researched the cost of professional video production you’ve most likely gotten a severe case of sticker shock. Prices generally start at around $1,000 per minute and can run as high as $5,000 per minute or more. This puts video out of the reach of most small businesses.
We, on the other hand, generally charge less. It’s not that we undervalue our time or cut corners when it comes to quality. Rather, we’ve discovered approaches to video production that result in savings we’re happy to pass on to clients. Here are some of the things we’ve learned.
The cost of equipment
This used to be among the biggest barriers to getting into video. In the early 2000s, we interned under the late Wes Skiles, who produced video for A&E, Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, among others.
At that time, your minimum investment in equipment included something like a Sony Betacam, a $20,000+ piece of equipment that did not stand up well to shooting outdoors. Today a $400 GoPro gets better quality video at a higher resolution.
Bear in mind, we’re not suggesting anyone use a GoPro as their primary camera. Nevertheless, most producers have one or more GoPros in their inventory. These are not only good for action shots but are also good for getting what is known as B-roll. This is the secondary footage producers will cut away to so that the action doesn’t appear to be shot solely from one angle.
Among the biggest drawbacks of shooting with GoPros is that, by default, they use an absurdly wide field of view. This leads to what is known as barrel distortion. This is when straight lines at the edge of the image appear curved.
Fortunately, GoPro lets your change your field of view to what they call Linear. This eliminates most barrel distortion yet it still offers a fairly wide field of view.
Producers often say that the best camera for any given job is the one you have with you. The high-definition camera almost no one seems to be without these days resides right inside your cellphone. Given adequate light, we’ve gotten some amazing spur-of-the-moment HD video using an iPhone.
The chief drawback of shooting with your phone is the lack of image stabilization. This is a feature the latest GoPros have but most cellphones lack. There is a workaround to this, however. It’s the $159 DJI OM 5. This compact image stabilizer can go with you anywhere and helps keep your phone rock steady when shooting video.
Despite these innovations, you are still going to need a more professional camera as your primary “gun.” Dedicated professional-quality video cameras generally start at around $2,000 and quickly go up. Still, one producer we follow on YouTube makes over a half-million dollars a year traveling the world’s oceans with a mirrorless Canon that costs under $1,000.
Over the past decade, we’ve discovered that every time we upgrade to more capable cameras, we spend less money doing so. These are savings we pass on to clients.
“You talentless hack…!”
On-screen talent can be expensive. If you want somebody who can do a credible job of talking to the camera, you’ll pay for it. But this is something you seldom need.
If you watch most of our videos, you will notice that whenever there is live action, it is usually real people wordlessly doing the sort of things that real people do. The sound comes from an off-camera voiceover. This not only saves the cost of professional talent, it greatly speeds production time.
It’s all artificial
Because one of our staff has a surprisingly good voice, we use to record all of our own voiceovers. The only problem we ran into was that, if we recorded parts of a script on two different days, the sound wouldn’t match. This is because people’s voices often change slightly from day to day.
These days, however, we are letting artificial intelligence do the work for us. There are services available that can turn your script into an amazingly human-sounding voiceover. You can hear an example in the video we produced for Janserv. The software lets us choose from a host of male and female voices and, no matter when we record various parts of a script, the sound alwys matches.
Using human voiceovers is a time-consuming process due to the need to spend hours cleaning up the sound later. In contrast, the AI-generated voiceovers are instantly ready to use, saving everyone time and money.
Not shot on location
The more you can avoid using live action in your videos, the more time and money you save. Live action footage requires either expensive studio time or all of the travel and other expenses associated with location shooting. To save our clients money, we like to avoid this whenever possible.
If you look at the videos on our Maintain Your Website pages, you will see that we did everything by adding animated titles and graphics to what are basically computer screenshots. The videos are effective but saved us a ton of money in production expenses.
To produce the previously mentioned Janserv video, we started with stock photography which we animated by zooming in and out, or panning left or right. We overlayed this with animated titles and graphics. The resulting three-minute video cost our client less than $1,000.
Just scratching the surface
What we have covered here are just a few of the tricks we’ve learned that help us produce quality videos while saving our clients a ton of money. (The Geico Gecko would be proud of us.) To discover how we can produce a highly cost-effective video for you, just contact us.