One of the most common, and most avoidable, issues we see podcasters and YouTubers make is that they record lots of great content and then it . . . never sees the light of day. It’s so easy to get excited about a video shoot and when it’s over, assume you are done. But the real work happens in what we call post-production — the project management, editing, and strategy that actually gets your videos out into the world in a timely manner looking their best. This is something we both do professionally, so we wanted to walk you through this often-overlooked part of the process of making great media for your business.
In this episode Tiff and Christine share insight on the value of hiring a post-production team to make sure your video content gets completed and published.
“Post-production gets your raw footage to your final version exactly how you wanted.”
Christine baird
Topics covered:
This season of the show is all about using a studio and a crew to film your show and make it look its best! That means that we filmed the whole season in Christine’s new studio in Salt Lake City, Worthfull Studios! We invite you to watch the full episode on YouTube to see everything we are talking about >> https://youtu.be/wOq6ohh4RRY
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Links mentioned:
- Looking for pro support to build your podcast? Find out more ways to work with us!
- Tiff Tyler
- Christine Baird
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Many thanks to our production team
- Casey Partridge for video editing
- Worthfull Media for audio editing
- Mosaico Productions for video effects
- Amela Subašić for artwork
Transcription of this episode:
(auto-generated, please forgive typos)
Christine (00:04):
Welcome to Think Like a Producer podcast. I’m your co-host Christine Baird.
Tiff (00:09):
And I’m your co-host Tiff Tyler. Being in the podcast industry, being in the content creation industry. This is what we learned, and this is how you can get out of your own way and get started.
Christine (00:20):
You name it. We’ve probably done it. This podcast is about bringing all the wisdom to you. Tune in weekly, to learn how to think like a producer.
Tiff (00:32):
Welcome to this episode of Think Like A Producer. Today we’re gonna talk about what to do with all this content that you’re filming. And this is a common pain point because I think what is so popular is to show the production side, to show the fancy camera, to show the fancy mics, to show, you know, your whole setup and what you’re doing. But then camera’s cut and now you’re just sitting with a bunch of footage. What now? So I wanna quickly go over some of the things we’ve talked about in other episodes. There’s really about three stages to this. There’s the pre-production and the planning, the actual production, the filming, and then the post-production with the editing. And all of this helps you kind of tick off of that big weight of what to do with the content. And the very beginning when you’re planning, when you’re scheduling with the producer, you’re going over where is this content gonna go? What is it for? And then you can actually go, maybe we’re gonna do four hours of content that we’re gonna break down into eight episodes, eight part series, eight part, however you decide. But it’s gonna give you a plan. Then you actually film and just like us today in the studio, things change or you know, things kind of go the way that they go. And you take those notes during production. That’s what
Christine (01:51):
You’re, I’m so sorry, but guys we’re real. I left the headphones in the shot. It’s in the shot. I know we’re showing you the real deal.
Tiff (01:57):
[inaudible] in the production piece, things might change, right? Uh, you thought you were gonna say it one way and it turned out to be something different. That’s the value of having a producer in the room with you or someone else in the room with you to support you through the ongoing evolution of what your content becomes when the camera’s actually rolling. And then the post-production side of cutting these things together. Working with a good editor who’s efficient, who understands your story and brand or who’s new and who’s learning to understand your story and brand. And then being able to set aside where each piece is going for social media clips, for main YouTube channel clips. Maybe these are a couple things that are trending on TikTok and here’s some clips we can kind of throw in there to support us. So there’s different stages to an actual project, right?
Tiff (02:42):
And so knowing those stages, going back maybe and listening to some of those episodes where we break it down a little bit more, it’s gonna help you not feel so over, not feel so overwhelmed about all the content that you’re gonna be recording. Cause I will tell you Christine, there is not one , maybe two or three hard drives of just blogs of me, just cuz I’ve traveled, I’ve done so many different projects. Mm-hmm , I’m like man, I gotta show people what I’m doing. But you know, I just kind of in the moment it’s a spur of the moment thing, whatever. And then you know, I go back to the job that I’m paid for and do my actual job and deliver for the client. So it’s not like, you know, this is definitely not us judging you or saying this is what you guys are doing.
Tiff (03:24):
We’re creators at heart too. Christine has her own podcast, uh, Worthfull Project and I think it’s great to actually be in the seats of the people that we’re consulting and know what it feels like to create content and it might just disappear on a hard drive because I didn’t think about how it was gonna cut it, when it was gonna go up, when it’s gonna be relevant to my audience and to the people around me. So trust me, you’re not alone in this. And so that’s why we wanna help you not just record this content, but get it out to the people so they can actually learn and see and your story can be out there.
Christine (03:56):
That was so beautiful. Okay, so I’m gonna just wrap up the episode, this part of it before we cut to our guest to briefly help you understand the actual work that goes into post-production. That’s the term we’ve referenced on the show before in season two, probably in season one, but this is how it actually looks. So when people hire my company for example, which is a production house, they’re hiring a producer to actually project manage is probably the easiest way to explain it. And that’s the person who’s like going between the editor and you to make sure that every edit and every piece that got shot gets edited the way it was intended to make sure everything got proofed, everything’s spelled correctly, the graphics look right. Oh, the grammar, the grammar Tiff and I have done,
Tiff (04:40):
Christine helps me with that so much.
Christine (04:41):
I mean, I don’t even know how many videos we’ve worked on together and I’m like, spell checking. And there’s a lot that goes into video editing and we’re not trying to leave out audio here. The same process happens if you’re doing audio only productions. But because we’re in the studio today, we’re just talking a little bit more about video. Obviously you can come here and record just audio, but what happens after you shoot and do a session is then the producer goes through all the footage, makes all the timestamps, sends those to the editor with the notes, Hey, here’s the clip that we finalized and chose between the three different takes we did and now we need you to go in and cut from here to here. Make sure you get this on the graphics, make sure this is the call to action at the end.
Christine (05:23):
This is for this segment. So we need it to be different than that segment. All of that project management, which is time consuming and can be overwhelming, which is why it often just gets left alone and never edited. That’s what a producer does. And then the editor obviously is doing the actual edits, whether it’s audio or video or both. And then the producer is really the go between. So if you’ve never worked with a producer and you’ve just worked straight with a video shooter or an editor, you might know what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of communication that happens and there’s a lot that happens with file management and organizing the different cuts and the different edits. V1, v2, v3, v4, you know, we’re okay, we’re almost there, but on V five we need just this little tweak. All of that is what we call post-production.
Christine (06:08):
So it gets your raw footage to your final version, exactly how you wanted. And that essential part of a shoot and a production is what allows you to then have content that you know exactly what to do with. Um, it’s easy to shoot and sometimes you get really excited about the shoot and you finish the shoot and you’re like, yes, it’s done , but it’s actually not because without a plan that a producer creates for you, this is what I do with a lot of my clients of like, okay, exactly where are we publishing this content? What platforms, what length, what topics, how often maybe we’re shooting, you know, a 10 episode mini-series for YouTube, but we also are making sure that we have cuts for LinkedIn and Instagram, maybe YouTube clips. We have to think about, okay, how often are we gonna cut? How often are we gonna post those?
Christine (07:01):
Maybe we’re gonna drop the whole season at once, but then we wanna share the clips for several months on social media. So that’s just hopefully wetting your appetite to think through all the things you can do with the content you shoot. You can tell that we’re trying very hard to convince you to bring on a team, or at least at the very least a producer to manage the process of getting all of your content edited and organized and delivered to you in a way that’s usable. Because we want all of your content to be out in the world, but there’s a lot of things you can do with it. And just because you hired a crew and did a shoot doesn’t mean you’re at the finish line because a capable team can take you there if you let them continue and handle the post-production and get it through to the end.
Christine (07:48):
Um, and honestly, unless you’re just absolutely love editing and making media, unless you’re like Tiff and I, you should really outsource this. Like this is way too much time and energy for you to do yourself. Just take it from us on that. If you are the host, if you’re the talent, if you’re the expert, getting in the weeds with all of this will just suck all the joy and time out of the whole process. So leave it to people who really do this for a living, have the experience, have the team, have the communication channels, have the platforms and can do that for you. And that will allow you to get the very most out of the content you shoot and it can just be delivered to you in beautiful folders on the cloud that is ready for posting with, you know, specific instructions and best practices. So that’s our vision for you. We’re gonna show you now, uh, our guest Emily, she’s a professional consultant and works with executives and we’re gonna kind of let you see how we are helping her think through a strategy for her content and what she’s going to do with what she gets shot. So we will show you some of that and then we’ll come back at the end and wrap it up.
Christine (08:55):
Hey everybody, we are here for this next segment. This is my friend Emily Chipman, who’s an executive coach and she’s the real deal. I just want you to know, I mean you can obviously tell , but the reason we wanted to feature Emily in this episode is because she actually makes a lot of content for her business. She has seen the vision, she’s drunk the Kool-Aid and she shoots videos in her home. She’s done live streaming. She understands having your content on multiple platforms, which means Emily , you make a lot of content . So tell me a little bit about how you’ve seen the value of making sure that you have a plan for the content you shoot versus just making stuff.
Emily (09:34):
Yeah, so one of the things that I learned is that it’s really important to have to be able to map out your year and know what you’re buying, what clients or other people are buying for. So, um, I know that when I am producing something, I’m thinking three, sometimes six, sometimes nine months down the road. And I need to be putting these things into people’s minds. So that’s one of the versions of of planning. There are other types of videos that are needed though, such as personality videos that are live in the moment. And having that plan to know exactly what you are speaking about and what you’re doing makes it a lot easier. And I will say less stressful. I really feel like your business can be a lot more successful and less stressful when you know what you’re driving to. And I didn’t do that at first.
Christine (10:21):
I mean, who does? We talked this morning about how we just like you only learn things by doing them, especially in media production. So thank you for telling us the truth. ,
Emily (10:32):
It was messy and bad. , I will be really candid and say I was not great at video or media production. I understood that I had classes that I was developing and so obviously there’s a lot of media that’s produced for that. Then you have things, you know, the media that would talk about the courses, but the reality is I needed people to come in and teach me like this podcast that there are lots of reasons and ways that you need to use it. So one of the, one of the things I did is I took a class from a place called Inspired Living that introduced me to five different types of content videos. And that was so helpful cause I’d never thought of it, of, of having to have something like a positioning video or personality videos versus videos that really show and highlight your expertise as part of that.
Emily (11:28):
One of the things that, that this woman talked about is the importance of using lots of platforms. For example, um, YouTube one of the most, one of the best resources because it’s one of the most commonly used search engines, but people very rarely use it. And so I, I think having made a lot of mistakes and then having invested in some of these resources that could help me, me, I have become a real fan and that’s actually what I’m in the process of developing and putting in place is having video that can go on YouTube, but you can cut it up and splice it and use little parts of it and put it on LinkedIn or you can put it on Instagram. And I will say as I have started doing this and I’m not even full up and running, it’s amazing how many followers have just been adding and coming on and the visibility that happens.
Tiff (12:21):
Okay, so now you’ve seen us walk through that process. Uh, I just want you to take a moment and imagine a world where you hire a team and you just come in, show up and let them deal with the content. Can you imagine man? So, uh, thank you for watching this episode. We really hope you learned a lot, got some new insights into this wonderful world of content creation, posting all the great things. And if you have any questions, of course you can always send it to us. Leave a comment below on our YouTube channel. We would love to have some reviews on our podcast. Um, while we do think that this season, you should definitely watch cuz these are hands-on tutorials. We understand that you’re in the car right now and you just wanna listen, you’re gonna watch later. So if this episode really did help you level up your ideas, your production, what you’re gonna do in the future, please leave us a review, helps us really, uh, get to more people so that we can share these ideas for absolutely free. If you’re not already, subscribe to the podcast and we will see you on the next episode of Think Like a Producer.
Christine (13:26):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Think Like a Producer. This has been a Worthfull Media production. Massive thanks to our team who makes the show possible. Worthfull Media for audio editing, Jorge and Veronica from Mosaico Productions for video effects and Amela Subasic for our amazing artwork and graphics.
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