Last year I shared with you how Elephant Productions, a video production house in Austin, TX, successfully performed a safe, socially distanced video production on a studio just outside Austin while our clients stayed in their homes hundreds of miles away.  Through the combination of a video encoder, a cloud-based review tool, and Zoom, our corporate clients were able to follow along and provide feedback almost as well as being there, and in some sense, it was better than being there.

At the time, I concluded that this method of “attending” a video production was here to stay. Even as we hopefully return to normal over the next several months, the removal of travel and lodging has the added benefit of significant cost savings for our clients.

So, some months later where do we stand now? I have attended a couple of virtual conferences over the past month where video production firms from across the world came together to discuss and focus on remote working, remote production, remote postproduction, remote everything basically. Products that provided remote workflows were only in their infancy before the pandemic and were forced to ramp up and mature as a lot of us went to work from home.  

New products have sprung up to fill the void where there was a need and even more are still rolling out today. I have learned a lot about products tailored to video production services that I never knew existed. I also was comforted to know that I am not alone in the need to research and experiment and combine products to make it all work.

As has always been the case in video and film production, there is not a one size fits all solution. The size and budget of the project are going to determine what tools you use.  A large-budget feature film might get all the cool bells and whistles.  Smaller budget productions, such as fundraising videos for non-profits, corporate video productions for internal communication, or awareness videos for healthcare firms, must make decisions about what makes financial sense.

So, what have we been implementing at Elephant Productions?  I’ll get to that in Part 2.