Key to Streamline
Your Post Production Workflow

One first essential step starts with making a good plan. For most professional productions, the plan takes the form of a well-crafted script along with detailed storyboards. Its fundamental to organize and prepare the various files from the production phase so you can plan the story you aim to tell, while maintaining a logical flow and consistency to it.

Right from the start, keep your media organized – a good, efficient video editor relies on effective media management. You should watch and organize all of the clips, trim away unusable footage, and provide as many great options as possible.

Once you’ve decided on the files you want to use for your video, import them into your project. Then, you can sort the footage into folders or “bins” which can be organized the way which works best for you.

After the clips have been organized, it’s time to create the rough cut. The goal of a rough cut is to make the best possible version of the director’s original intentions. Here are simple rules for a rough cut:

• You must use all of the coverage, including at least once instance of each angle, all designed camera moves, and planned shots like rack focus’s and dolly shots.
• You must not remove any script lines or scenes.
• You must not change the order of any lines or scenes.

The first cut is the rough cut that is accepted by the editor, the director and the producer. Selection and sequence are basically fixed, although changes can still be made. 

The fine cut no longer focuses on the entire film, but on the details of each and every cut. The fine cut emphasises and strengthens the rhythms and structures identified in the first cut.

You can turn a mediocre video into a remarkeble one by utilizing color correction and grading. Simply put, color correction is about fixing problems in exposure, contrast, white balance, and overall color to produce a natural, baseline image which matches the eye’s view. Color grading is where you make your artistic choices, set your mood, and let color and contrast help establish your world and tell your story.

Now that you have your polished edit, it’s time to add corrections, enhancements and visual effects.
With design computer-generated visual effects you are able to achieve effects that aren’t always feasible in real life. Visual effects can range from digital animation, implementing a green screen background or making something blow up!

Adding the final visual effects to a video in the post production stage, whether it’s something as subtle as colour rendition, image correction and compression, or more noticeable technical visual effects tweaking - represents a critical final step for any film.

With your visual edits and effects now in place, it’s much easier to add in music and other sound effects and synchronize it to your video. Here a few important points to consider: 

• Clean up any sound that needs it, using noise filters and other audio tools to remove as much unwanted background noise as possible
• Then you can add enhancements like sound effects, voiceovers, music, and everything else which makes a great video experience.
• Prepare the final mix. Now that your file has been edited and adjusted, it’s time to finalize the mix and export it to your preferred file formats. 

Now it’s time to add titles and credits at the beginning and end of your video, and any other text you may need. Don’t forget that you have the chance to make titles really creative and interesting! 

Now that the video and audio have been mixed, it’s time to export your video file. The desired formats should have been specified in the brief, and you’ll most frequently want to deliver a suite of final cuts - this enables you to share the video on a range of channels. 

During post production, you’re often working against a fast-approaching deadline So is crucial to have the ability to adapt quickly to unexpected changes. 

Adopt the NLE approach will give you an upper hand so that you can adapt quickly without complication.

Non-linear editing removed all of the limitations of linear editing – including the complete elimination of dubs – and added countless advantages. By copying files to the hard disk, it is also possible to make various corrections to the material. 

Some of the benefits:

• Flexible Editing: it allows you to develop a workflow style which best suits you and how your creative mind works.
• Non-Destructive: original media files are never changed, replaced, or deleted
• Freedom to Make Mistakes: make easy to move clips and segments around, and even copy and paste clips or complete segments from one place to another. 
• Easy Re-Editing/Replacement of Media: move, re-edit, delete, or restore whole segments with ease. Save multiple versions of your sequence for later reference. 

Tip: Find out more about Non-Linear Editing (NLE) and its advantages

Take in your original media files and creating a new transcode for them during NLE (non-linear editing). The advantage you’ll get from this is that these files are easier to process and handle than the original files. 

Tip: Every video editing software handles this process a bit differently so that you might have to do a bit of searching.

Take your original files, create low-resolution proxies for them, and use them instead for editing. What we’re suggesting instead is to create the rough-cut using proxy files and finalize that. That would take you much less time, and once you have the rough cut, you can switch back to the original high-resolution files for other corrections and/or enhancements.

This way, you save time, don’t risk slowing or damaging your system, and streamline the workflow even more.