So you've recorded all the video of your event, and your brother-in-law has some video editing software that just might be able to edit your footage? Don’t be fooled – proper post production is much more involved and complicated than it may appear on the surface. It’s often easy to underestimate the effort that goes into post-producing video footage of any kind, whether narrative in nature, or pure non-fiction such as conference and event video. Post-production is a multi-step process that encompasses a great scope of techniques and procedures. Let’s examine some of these steps so that you can understand why choosing a professional post production service can be more beneficial to your needs.

1. Ingest: When your video is captured on site, the raw footage is then transferred to a hard drive, which is delivered to a post-production service. Editors then must ingest this raw footage into professional non-linear editing software, such as Final Cut Pro.
2. Editing: The tedious task of editing comes next. Your footage is trimmed for length, edited for consistency and to remove errors. If you are using footage from a multi-camera shoot, this is when the post production team stitches this footage together, and where cutaway and B-roll footage comes into play.
3. Color Correction: The video must then be color corrected, which ensures that the hues and colors remain consistent across the footage of your various recordings, regardless of the time of day or the temperature of the light in the room. This brings out the natural tones in human skin, and ensures that no part of the frame is overexposed/blown out.
4. Audio: Next, audio is then adjusted and equalized for consistency and quality. This can be especially tedious depending on the microphone set up at your event, and whether or not multiple microphones were used during Q&A sessions.
5. Graphics: After adjusting audio, a post production team goes through the important task of graphics creation. This is where  lower-third graphics, credits, and PowerPoint cutaways come into play. This is also the stage at which your sponsor or corporate branding is incorporated into the video, again a professional task above and beyond the capabilities of most consumer post-production software.
6. Encoding: At this point, the video is ready to be encoded for upload to the internet, a process that is flexible depending on file formats, resolutions, and destinations. A professional post production team will have the necessary understanding of the technicalities of this step, where an encoding error can ruin the entire footage.
7. Chaptering: Once the video has been prepared, it is chaptered and highlights are created  - a task that should be performed by professional editors, and they are the ones who have the most intimate and thorough understanding of your footage.

Now that you know how involved the process of post-production is, it’s important to know that professional post production ensures all of these tasks are executed with the highest regard to quality, consistency, and your schedule. The goal of every event organizer dealing with video footage should be to achieve the quality and post-production standards available with professional post-production services. If you’d like to learn more, shoot us an email at services@fora.tv.