At the core of every busy wedding season is this overwhelming sense of excitement. Wedding photographers have their calendars packed solid with bookings, constant new lead generation, and a number keep coming in, and every weekend brings another story to capture. From the outside, it looks like everything is going exactly as planned.
Then Monday arrives.
It’s tough to edit through hours of video after a fun weekend or before another one! Wedding videographers often find that maintaining current edits during busy seasons is the toughest part of maintaining a viable video business. The really good news is that having a full schedule doesn’t necessarily mean you have an ever-increasing stack of unfinished editing projects.
Avoid Turning Each Project into an Emergency situation
It’s easy to fall behind on work during wedding season by treating each wedding as an individual emergency. You will finish working on a wedding, then go shoot the next wedding, and not get back to editing until you have some time.
You can create a lot of difference with a basic production planning tool. By setting reasonable internal deadlines for each of these projects, no matter how far the client deadline may be, you will be better off. Once you have secured your footage, determine when your project should be organized, when the first cut needs to be completed, and when you can expect revisions to happen.
Creating a project management template will be very helpful for you. You might just want to see your upcoming weddings and the ones that can take their time using a spreadsheet or a calendar so you will know exactly where you are in your projects.
Identify the Tasks That Require Your Input
Not every aspect of post production needs to be done by you personally. Your creative choices matter the most; you are privy to the intimate details and nuances of the wedding day and know intimately the aesthetic vision your couple has for their wedding photography. Yet, things like organizing files or raw video clips, syncing audio and video, creating rough edits, and creating multiple edits for your clients might not necessarily be This is where hiring out can really help you.
Rather than attempting to manage every step of each and every project yourself, you have the ability and the option to select certain parts of the workflow and turn them over to someone else to handle. As a result, you gain additional time to focus on the storytelling as well as client communication.
Reduce your workload by outsourcing
An outside editing team can provide much needed post-production support to a small studio so that the videographer will not have to employ another full-time individual. When your day is full, just send your project out employee. You can send out a project when your own schedule becomes overloaded and keep working on the areas where your personal input matters most.
Additionally, there is a variety of services available which help to make the transition easier due to the fact that wedding editing has its specific rhythms and standards. A wedding film is much more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. The editor has to basically know how to use basically everything that did happen, every speech, every ceremony, every reaction, the music, the atmosphere, and the spontaneous, little moments which give the film its individuality.
When thinking about outsourcing, checking the wedding video editing cost may give you a good idea of where to begin. The real problem is not the value of one hour to edit your video, but instead: How much would that same hour spent somewhere else in your company be worth to you?
Communicate Clearly
It’s really wearying when long email chains become normal during the peak season.
Having a good editing brief will eliminate most of the unnecessary back-and-forth you will have with your editor. The basic information that most editors need includes; preferred style of editing, pivotal points in the video, desired genre or mood of music to be used, examples (references) of the desired style, specific requests from the client, and anything that must not be included.
Taking Care of Your Own Energy is Crucial
Apart from all the technical stuff and productivity techniques, there is one other part of dealing with editing backlog that is absolutely unrelated to technology.
Wedding videography takes a huge toll, physically and mentally. There are marathon filming sessions, lots of travelling, carrying around heavy gear, dealing with clients and being able to make spontaneous creative choices. If you pile on numerous nights of editing after a long day of filming, At times, the most astute business move you could make is simply to cease trying to do everything yourself.
Having another editor take over some of the burden will help you reclaim many of your evenings and weekends that are now spent on the computer. The time you save will allow you to relax more, so you’ll have more time to spend with family or start the next project with a refreshed mind.
Don’t Let a Crazy Schedule Lead to More Backlogged work
A busy wedding season is a great part of this job; one of the many reasons people decide to get married during a time of year when it’s packed with events all the time.
The objective however is not to have no work to do, but rather build a working system to manage the workload.
Create a project plan ahead of time. Standardize routine tasks. Develop a method to keep tracks of Keep communication organized. And when the workload becomes larger than your available hours, don’t be afraid to bring in outside help.
