With so many businesses producing a marketing video, not having your own is like slamming the door in the face of potential customers. Video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo make distribution easy! Effectively these are free worldwide broadcast networks; and their business potential is huge! For the more ‘traditional’ corporate video user Blu-Ray technology means that for exhibition or display use your product or service can really shine in cinema quality. And of course traditional DVD and IPTV technologies mean even more opportunities to take the big blue-chip companies on at their own level!
You might already own a fancy video camera and a high-end computer with all the latest editing software. I’ve even seen software advertised that claims to turn you into an online video producer in five minutes! It all seems too good to be true!
So you think you’re ready to shoot your corporate video? You couldn’t be more wrong! Barnum was talking nonsense, there is such a thing as bad publicity. Just ask Gerald Ratner !
The first thing to realise is that cameras don’t take pictures. People take pictures! Cameras are just the tools that allow them to do it! And tools require skill to use.
Put a chainsaw in the hands of an untrained operator and they’re more likely to remove a limb from themselves than from a tree! And just ask anyone who works in an A&E department to relate a few tales of DIY injuries!
There is far more to the process of making a corporate video than simply getting pictures on the screen! Anything done for marketing or PR purposes is by definition a piece of professional communication. And the implications of what you do at a professional level cut across issues of technical competence, legal safety, aesthetic merit, communicative effect and cost effectiveness. Your business may be tiny, but when you step onto that world-class stage you’re presentation needs to compete with that of giants.
So what are these five golden rules to making a good corporate video?
1) Hire a pro…
What will make your video stand out from the others? How will it be different so that your potential customers will notice you? And will they notice you for the right reasons? Will your online video generate sales leads or just get lost among all the random chaff out there? Or worse still, will your online video turn you into a complete laughing stock?
The thing you don’t want is for your video to stand out because it’s a DIY disaster. And you especially don’t want your business credibility to be ‘injured’ because your corporate video has become a viral comedy.
So, cameras don’t take pictures and putting tools in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them can be dangerous. Where do we go from here? Well, to the same place you’d go to get any job done. To a person who not only owns all the right tools for the job but has the skills to use them safely and effectively. You need to speak to a properly qualified video producer. That means someone who has either….
1) Completed a proper apprenticeship/traineeship with a major broadcaster and probably a course of formal study and examination associated with that.
2) Studied TV production to a minimum of Higher National level at a legitimate academic institution such as an FE/HE college.
3) Holds a degree level qualification in TV production from a UK or credible overseas university.
Be warned. There are no other routes to becoming a legitimate, properly qualified professional within the UK TV and Video production industries. So DO look for someone with a proper degree, HND or who served an apprenticeship with one of the big well-known broadcasters. And DON’T be taken in by someone sporting sham ‘qualifications’ or ‘letters’ after their name that have been issued by some trade association. These sham qualifications are no more credible than a $10 degree bought off Ebay!
Preferably try to find someone with at least 5 years post-educational experience to lead the production side of the project.
Qualified video producers work at all market levels. Some specialise in producing very low budget programmes. Others work at the high end broadcast/blue chip level. Across the range they work to various business models. You may for instance find yourself dealing with a one-man-band (even at blue chip level) or equally well a small company which can deploy several teams at once (even at the cheaper end of the market). Or perhaps one of the major blue-chip oriented production houses? You pays your money and you takes your choice!
There is a really wide choice of qualified producers in the UK all with varying styles, capabilities and specialities. The best advice here is that once you’ve established they are properly qualified is to go with someone who you personally like, who’s visual style you like and who you can get on with on a face to face basis.
Budget wise you’ll save money by going to a small independent producer, perhaps a solo broadcast freelancer or someone who specialises in the low budget market. Bigger firms can often offer a more ‘corporate’ experience with plush premises and good levels of hospitality. Often this is backed up by more advanced technical capabilities. But equally often that’s not particularly obvious in the end product and can simply bloat the final invoice.
2) The script, the script and the story matter most…
Ok; so you have your qualified producer in place, or at least you’ve made the initial contact…
From the outset realise that you’re not just hiring them for their kit any more than you take your car to the garage to be serviced just because the guy there has a full set of spanners!
Of course you expect them to have a full range of shooting, lighting and sound equipment! And it is absolutely necessary to have all the right tools for the job; which is another reason you’re not going to get away with doing the programme on your camcorder and laptop. But primarily you’re paying for their skill and knowledge.
It’s important for you to realise that it’s your story the producer has to tell. And it’s that story that will make or break your video.
Now, all trained video producers know how to glean a story from the information available to them. But few are psychic! And it helps enormously if you have clear, well defined ideas about what you want. That doesn’t mean the producer should be prepared to abdicate responsibility for the shooting script or any other aspect of production (run a mile from any who are!). But any producer worth their salt will welcome your basic script ideas with open arms.
Of course you don’t have to do that; but it’s preferable. If you prefer to take a back seat here the producer will work with what they can gather , and generally do so to good effect. But good producers actually prefer a high level of client input.
Where to start though? Humans are almost literally hard-wired towards engaging with a narrative flow; a story in other words. I can tell you with absolute certainty that your audience wants a story. And this is where many corporate videos fall down. In fact it’s where many corporate presentations in general fall down!
Fact: A series of facts and figures and image statements is completely un-engaging!
So instead tell your audience a story. Beginning, middle, end. What, why and how… What do you do? Why do you do it? How will it help them? Build your facts and figures and policies and image statements into that story. And close with an opening… Give the viewer the chance to interact with you. Simple!
3) Make them care…
Next, consider the Vicky Pollard effect. Are they bovvered?
Like it or not emotion plays a big part in business decisions. It’s not all about logic. You need to make the viewer care about you and care about what you do and what you have to say. And in business, that’s hard!
Caring means being concerned about and sympathetic to your message. How do you engender that? Why should your audience be concerned and sympathetic about what you do? Your clients are busy, serious minded people. You competitors are just a click away and their message is engaging and inspiring and passionate and thoroughly professional and they have confidence in it….
It’s a tough act to follow. Your corporate video should have the same if not greater passion. Again; people don’t particularly care about statistics, comparisons, charts and graphs, and I make no apology for labouring that point.
People use and value these things as tools. They use them to compare nuts and bolts and to verify things but, particularly in these post-spin doctor times, people are cynical and suspicious of stats and charts. Even though a point might be ‘provable’ with statistics it’s far more believable if it’s backed up with a personal story.
Connect with something within a person and they’ll trust you. What’s more, they’ll encourage others to trust you too.
4) Culture the Benefits…
The thing with your business is it’s all about you. And your customer’s business is all about THEM! We’re not robots, emotion is what makes us human and being human isn’t a bad thing!
Let the benefits of your product or service take precedence over the features; the logic of this is actually fairly clear… Features can easily be built into or cut out of any product. Price, performance, facilities, all are factors that are directly measurable one against the other. And we all know that we balance features against each other to place our product or service at a given point in the market.
The features of a product or service satisfy the logical, rational mechanistic side of the human psyche . But what’s left after logic? Where does your unique selling point really lie? Assume for a moment that the logical mind is satisfied with the features you offer. And that they’re better than your competitors. Surely you’ll corner the market?
Yes; I’m being deliberately silly here! Of course it’s more complicated than that. Ultimately, we are motivated to purchase things by our feelings and emotions. We feel good buying your product. We feel empowered using your service. Your customers don’t feel the features. They feel your benefits. Sell the benefits. It’s about them, not you.
5) Kiss and tell…
I’m often baffled to review our website’s search logs to find people looking for one hour and two hour corporate videos. This is, by far, away too long for a marketing video.
Commercial television has conditioned people to expect the commercial message in short bursts. Very successful corporate marketing videos are often no more than two minutes in length. And a typical running time is under five minutes. Occasionally a very complex factual presentation might run to twenty minutes or more.
But really the golden rule here is to stick to the old cliché, Keep It Short and Simple… Your sales and marketing video, your corporate profile, your exhibition video all should open doors for your sales force. They shouldn’t replace them!
Keep it Short and Simple and Tell them what you can do for them!
Matt Quinn,
Beware of the home movie!
15/03/2009
Fail to plan and you plan to fail!
That’s an old cliché of course. But perhaps one of the least appreciated aspects of producing a video is planning. In general terms, the bulk of the work involved in producing a video programme is at the planning stage. Programme planning means far more than just writing a script! The production process is one where specialist project management skills meet technical expertise, artistic talent, legal knowledge and administrative skills. When you call in a production Company (at least when you call in a legitimate production company!) it is essentially these skills that you are buying; not the use of the equipment they happen to have!
Machines don’t make the programmes, people do!
This is an important point to consider when choosing a producer. All the fancy cutting edge digital gizmos in the world make up for bad planning, poor camerawork or simple lack of visual flair. No legitimate professional will ever agree to simply ‘turn up and shoot’ part or all of your corporate video. And, whoever you chose, it pays to be wary of those who pay scant regard to or are even ignorant of the production process. Through complete and effective planning of every aspect of the programme, legitimate TV professionals ensure that precious and expensive shooting and editing time is not wasted!
A professional approach for a professional result!
Beware of those who promote a ‘Bodge-it, Flog-it and Run’ mentality. We know of businesses that have gone down through losing all credibility by following some of the half-witted notions put about by self-appointed marketing gurus! These guys are snake-oil salesmen who have NO direct interest in your business other than to sell you some over-priced book or ‘course’ or consultancy. Often they’re selling to an international market, or at best operating from territories so far away as to ensure they’ll never witness or have to deal with the fall-out from what they do.
You can’t make a decent corporate video yourself with your ‘prosumer’ camcorder and some editing software! To cope with most business situations you need a range of proper sound, lighting and postproduction capabilities as well as the skills to use them. In reality the basic tools to do the job will cost you upwards of £20,000! As for the skills to use them… It takes 2400 hours of study over two years to reach a minimum level of qualification to work as a junior on a professional video crew. And it’s absolutely crackers to suggest that this is something people can manage after reading a few internet articles or over-priced books!!
There are some RIDICULOUS howlers on YouTube! And they universally make the businesses behind them look cheap, shoddy and amateurish. Is your business really some half-assed amateur side show or is it a serious professional endeavour? Barnumites need read no further!
More seriously, there are legal implications involved with producing a corporate video, and many of these home-produced videos are actually exposing the owners to a serious threat of litigation at a level that could cost them their business, their livelihood and even their homes! That is NO joke!
Always remember the credibility of your business is at stake here; you’re making a professional business TV programme, not a home movie! It’s a skilled job. Of course a professional will provide the skills and make the process simple for you, shaping your requirements into a programme you can be proud of.
In any case, ‘DIY Corporate videos’ are a false economy anyway! These days you can hire the services of properly trained, legitimately qualified experienced producers at very affordable rates! And No! We don’t mean the local wedding videographer!, although even they present a far better option than going ‘DIY’! Even the most junior staff at TFGtv.com for instance hold an HNC level qualification in TV production. Most hold degree level qualifications and/or were trained by major international broadcast companies. Our cheapest production package is well under £500!
Allow ample time to complete your programme!
Something you MUST take into account and be aware of when commissioning a professional video is that it takes time to make! It is not simply a case of a cameraman being able to ‘turn up’ on a certain date to film! If you’re thinking about having a video made contact a production company at the earliest possible opportunity! If you don’t, you’re likely to get a less-well planned and executed product and pay through the nose for it too! Production companies save money through advanced planning, and you should benefit from those savings too!
Production times vary widely of course and are influenced by a great many variables. Ideally you should start the commissioning process twelve or more and certainly no less than about six weeks before you envisage the programme will begin shooting. Once past the pre-production stage programmes typically take a further four to six weeks to complete. A typical timescale from first meeting to delivery of the master disc (i.e. your finished programme ready for duplication) is around ten weeks.
Essentially though the more time taken to plan the programme the more thoroughly and economically it can be produced. Programmes CAN be produced in MUCH shorter time scales, but this will have a devastating effect on the budget! The corporate video industry is buoyant and GOOD video production staff are constantly busy and in great demand. The only people standing around twiddling their thumbs are in that position because they’re NOT in demand! Draw your own conclusions on this! To pull GOOD production staff in at short notice IS possible! However this can only be done by paying a premium rate for them! Typically that will at least double the staff budget. Bring the production company in EARLY in the project and save money!
Programme production goes through several distinct project phases:
1) Commissioning. At this stage you, the client, are considering having a programme made. You need to chose a production company, decide upon an approach and ultimately authorise a producer to move your ideas forward to the next stage.
2) Pre-Production. From the production company’s point of view around 50% of the work involved in making a programme is at the pre-production stage. It’s at this point that scripts are produced and the production is scheduled.
3) Production. The ’sharp end’ of TV production and often the only part of the process people see. Camera crews arrive, programmes are shot, presenters present and directors direct. It’s a popular misconception that this is the main part of the process; it’s not! A properly organised crew work quickly and efficiently to gather the material decided upon in pre production. It accounts for about 20% of the overall work.
4) Post-Production. ‘Editing’ as it’s casually referred to is the process whereby all the different elements are drawn together to make a finished programme. Of course that’s a gross over-simplification. A good editor is worth their weight in gold, and the post-production process itself is a complex and involved one accounting for about 30% of the production company’s involvement.
5) Distribution. At this stage the programme is finished and from the production company’s perspective in the hands of the client. Though a few production companies also have duplication facilities and an interest in this type of work it is quite distinct from the business of making programmes.
Of course no legitimate producer simply ‘washes their hands’ of the programme at this stage. Expect your producer to be able to advise on and work closely with both your chosen duplication company and suppliers of any audio-visual equipment you may need to actually get the programme in front of an audience.
Corporate video is an affordable reality for the smallest of ambitious businesses. It’s a business tool, but like any tool it needs to be used with skill and consideration or it can become a destructive weapon.
The story of how the Russians sent men into space with pencils, whereas the Americans (actually an American company off their own back) spent a King’s ransom on developing the Fisher Spacepen is commonly trotted out as an example of how a simplified approach to a problem can save significant amounts of money. But that approach only works to a (carefully sharpened) point!
Yesterday I took issue with a man who I regard as a flim flam artist. A dangerous character (in my view) who, in his rush to buoy up his own ego is placing the wellbeing of other people’s jobs and businesses at risk. How is he doing this? By encouraging them to play fast and loose with the credibility of their businesses.
It’s a sad and simple truth that many ‘wannabees’ are attracted to the creative industries. Some are out and out charlatans out to make a quick buck. Others, simple bunglers who half-understand the job and operate in blissful ignorance. Others still, desperate to be ‘part of the scene’ scuttle about doing anything for anybody and never really develop a great level of competence at anything. The web design, marketing, graphics and corporate video industries do seem to be significantly affected by these types. It can be dangerous to buy into their ‘flim flam’. And that’s especially true of you’re a small business trying to compete in a big world.
One of the most influential marketers of the 20th century was advertising executive Leo Burnett who created such icons as the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, the 7up “Spot”, and Tony the Tiger. One of the icons he used was of a black pencil that symbolised a commitment to the warmth and humanity of ideas, and to the work of the people who create them. Burnett also created an icon of a ‘hand reaching for the stars’, which he explained with the saying, “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either”.
Reaching for the stars, TRULY, reaching for the stars is essential to make your business grow. Merely aping those who are reaching out is more likely to see you topple over face down in the mud!
So, you’re reaching for the stars. And you decide to use video in your promotional plan….
The first and most vital piece of advice we’ll give is to be 100% sure the production company you use are legitimate professionals; properly trained, properly qualified and operationally competent. Whilst it’s not necessary to use a broadcast company it is essential to use people who are broadcast trained and fully understand the process. Sadly many aren’t and don’t!
Whatever you do don’t be tempted to go down the ‘DIY’ route.
So-called ‘prosumer’ video cameras might cost just a few thousand pounds. And the ‘toy’ video editing packages you see in your local computer store may well make all sorts of promises about their capabilities. The truth is most of those packages are only just on the ‘right’ side of the law in terms of the Trades Descriptions Act. And buying just a video camera in the hope of making corporate video is a bit like buying an Airfix kit without budgeting for the glue, paints and skill necessary to complete it!
For instance once you’ve bought your ‘prosumer’ camera you need various accessories for it. A decent basic tripod to suit a Sony Z1 will cost you about £500. Then you need microphones (our most basic mic kit cost almost £3000) lighting (another £2-3000 or so) extra batteries, chargers, high quality headphones….. Count on spending £15,000 on basic shooting kit to match even the most poorly equipped pro. Oh; and editing software… Close to £1000 and you’re probably looking at £2000+ to get a very basic edit system that works properly.
Minimally you’d need to spend about £20K to reach a very basic level of professional operating capability. Then there are the skills needed. Yes; any idiot can pick up a domestic camcorder and with the help of some cheap software string together some sort of programme. But just bear in mind what you’re competing with: Slick expensively produced blue-chip corporate television.
We see far too many home movies masquerading as corporate video and they invariably reflect badly on the clients behind them. Only last year I watched first in bemusement then in horror as a woman wept at the reaction her husband’s DIY corporate had provoked. Their ‘corporate’ home movie was head to head with those from other small businesses. All of which had been properly produced by people who knew their trade.
The business with the DIY job were left looking like half-assed idiots! And with their credibility ebbed away their business, their income and the jobs of the people they employed! There are also legal issues involved with producing a programme which, if ignored or unknown, could land you in very hot water indeed. We’ll brush over the illegally used music the couple had incorporated into their video!
The sad irony is that the sort of programme they had attempted to produce would only have cost them about £1200…. Less than half what, it emerged, the hapless husband had spent on his new toy video camera! The best tools in the world are completely useless in the hands of those without the skills and training to use them properly.
On that score you might want to think about why it takes anyone legitimately entering the video production business around 2400 hours of full time study over at least two years to gain a basic minimum qualification that will allow them to train with a broadcaster or corporate producer.
We’ve often seen the notion of a ‘one stop shop’ floated as a positive selling point when it comes to video production with some so-called ‘media producers’ claiming to do everything ‘in-house’ from building your web site through to supplying you with a skating Santa Claus and designing your brochures! One of the most commonly floated notions by these operators being that this avoids the client being faced with bills from, or having to deal with, a number of different contractors or companies.
This would be reasonable coming from the sort of multi-million-pound production facility which services the high end of the market and charges five-figure budgets. Such organisations can afford to keep teams of experts on salary as well as invest in the complex, expensive and diverse facilities necessary for each task.
On budgets more appropriate to small to medium businesses though you should beware the bodger who claims to be everything from expert photographer through graphic designer to web designer through to ace film producer. Each of the specialism’s in the creative industries take many years and much training to master. Your business deserves the attention of experts not ‘blaggers’. It’s common enough for people to be to some extent multi-skilled. But the mark of a true professional is the knowledge of where their limits lie coupled to the experience to know quality and how it’s best achieved.
Jack-of-all-trades was master of none; remember? No creative professional worth hiring is so short of work they have to scrabble about desperately taking on anything and everything vaguely creative and/or pretending to be something they’re not. Such behaviour though is very typical of the charlatans who inhabit the fringes of the creative industries.
You wouldn’t hire a plumber to fit a new brakes to your car nor a motor mechanic to fit a gas heater. Putting the credibility of your business in the hands of an amateur bodger is almost as daft as playing fast and loose with your personal safety.
As for the ‘one stop’ invoice? This should be routine; it’s standard practice and not a unique selling point! ANY competent professional video producer will, as part and parcel of the process, FULLY project manage your production. This will mean of course that the various component parts such as music, graphics and animation come from different sources. However, unless you specify otherwise, the process should be fairly seamless .
If you’re serious about business leave the crayons and the mud pies to the toddlers. You don’t HAVE to spend tens of thousands on creative services its true. There ARE affordable, truly professional options out there. And the low-cost end of the creative market grows on a daily basis. DON’T hire amateurs, DON’T DIY … Properly qualified people aren’t necessarily expensive; it’s just a matter of knowing where to look!
Barnum, the wolf, and the cheapskate video!
10/03/2009
“Moving images have been used for marketing since the dawn of cinema. What’s different now is that everyone can do it. Digital cameras are everywhere, prosumer video editing software is now affordable, broadband is widespread, and YouTube – now part of Google – is the perfect video publishing platform, and it’s free!”
So wrote one Francois Wolf in a WordPress blog recently. The thing is, most of that is complete and utter nonsense! And fairly dangerous nonsense at that!
Some of what Wolf writes is true of course. You only have to look back through cinema history to see early examples of corporate video. The old Empire and GPO film units are prime examples (Think Grierson and “Night Mail”). Even Butlins, the holiday camp people, had their own film unit at one time. The corporate video industry is buoyant and well-founded. It’s grown through early news-reel type promos for cinema release through the video cassette phenomena, DVD, multimedia and now the internet provides platforms in the form of sites such as Vimeo and YouTube! And yes, these platforms are pretty-much free!
Video is indeed “hot”. But like anything hot you need to know how to handle it lest you get burned!
The Blue-chips spend tens of thousands on individual videos on an almost daily basis! The power of video as a marketing tool is undoubted, and the opportunities have never been greater. However like any tool its best used well or not at all.
YouTube is, quite frankly, littered with half-assed home movies masquerading as business videos. This isn’t, despite what the some would have you believe, good for the businesses involved. The only value these farces have is comedy value. And not in the sense of being informal or relaying a form of ‘relaxed professionalism’. They’re just bad videos!
Universally the businesses behind them are left looking like complete amateurs. Which, of course, is EXACTLY what they are in video production terms. The corner-shop mentality promoted by people like Wolf is really what holds many small businesses back and there’s no real need for it! Professional producers these days can produce complete programmes for just a few hundred pounds (or dollars) upwards. And will produce TOP QUALITY results in a fraction of the time an amateur would waste….
My own company for instance, like most corporate production companies, provides a no-frills package that would cost you less than the price of decent editing software! And that’s properly produced by a trained broadcast professional, shot on professional equipment in High Definition. It places full broadcast lighting and sound kit at your disposal (as well as decades of experience). And provides a full professionally managed audit trail to protect your legal interests.
Wolf completely misses that last vital point. Many amateur-produced ‘corporate’ videos (and I include things like band promos and music video in that) are absolute time bombs waiting to go off! Did YOU know that including a scene where some kids sing “Happy Birthday” in your video could cost £7000 ($10,000) in clearance fees? Or that you could be facing a £35,000 bill for simply including an un-cleared photograph or graphic in your video? Of course a truly professional producer would know all this and take the appropriate steps to protect their client’s interests. But take that DIY route and you may well place yourself in dangeously unskilled hands.
Wolf goes on to say…
“Video drives response rates that are 5-10 times higher that other tools. That is not a fact that can be lightly ignored without suffering some competitive pressure from firms that do use it. In other words, the arms race is on.”
Quite so. An “arms race” is a great analogy. And in any arms race the people to watch are those with the big guns. Ever watched those scenes on TV where some dominant military force drives tanks and guns through a mass of petrol-bomb toting insurgents? Well the ‘big guns’ here take the form of the blue-chip corporate who are also putting their stuff on YouTube!
The home produced ‘Toytown’ movies that Wolf promotes are going head-to-head and being directly compared to short films produced by experts. Originality and “coolness” can’t easily make up for lack of professional production values . Originality and “coolness” need to be COMBINED with professional production values to produce the desired effect. And that applies as much as to the promotion of a college band as it does any major artist (and of course to any small business as much as it does a major international corporation).
In-house produced videos are , according to Wolf;
“ the logical consequence of the “lower quality expectations” and the affordability of video-making tools. A marketing team with some creative talent will soon develop an efficient process for making videos. And the boost to morale and creativity alone is almost worth the journey.”
Well, for one, “quality expectations” are very much on the rise not the decline! It’s now over three years since my company last shot anything in standard definition. And both viewers and clients (quite rightly) are demanding more in terms of lighting, sound and presentation than ever before. Times have moved on since it was enough to simply get a reasonable picture onto the screen.
High-Definition, web streaming, surround sound…. Viewers are much more sophisticated than back in the day of the GPO film unit or even of the VHS recorder! Besides which, the old maxim ‘rubbish in rubbish out’ was never truer than with web video. High quality productions better survive the quality reduction YouTube and other systems impose on ALL video footage that is uploaded.
In any case your corporate video or music promo has uses that potentially extend WELL beyond YouTube! DVD, Blu-Ray, multimedia, conferences, exhibitions…. A professionally produced programme can easily be re-versioned at minimal cost to fill a number of different roles. Band promos for instance will often find their way into broadcasts or release as products in their own right. And High Definition corporates are the order of the day on many cutting edge exhibition stands.
It’s true of course that video making tools are becoming more affordable. 20 years ago our mobile production unit carried almost £25,000 worth of equipment on board whilst our post production suite represented an investment of almost £50,000. Enough to buy you a new Range Rover with enough spare change left for a nice three-bedroomed Victorian Semi. These days we carry about £15,000 worth of kit and around £10,000 buys you a decent edit suite. And £25K wouldn’t even buy you the Range Rover! Although it’s still a fair investment.
It’s a fallacy though that the sort of low cost ‘prosumer’ kit we see touted by the likes of Wolf is any kind of equivalent to the tools of even the most poorly equipped professional.
As for Mr Wolf’s suggestion that a “marketing team with some creative talent” are adequately equipped to produce a video. Barnumesque bunkum of the first water! It takes 2400 hours of full time study to gain a basic video production qualification. And the industry has already developed “efficient processes” over a century of cinema and television. You might want to give some thought to the wisdom of having untrained people re-invent the wheel Mr Wolf!
For less than the price of some decent editing software you can have the services of a properly trained, properly qualified, fully equipped video production team. Or you can risk your reputation and posibly the whole wellbeing of your business on a YouTube howler!
Go figure! As they will insist on saying in the ‘States!
