How to Budget Time for a Post-Production Project

Video Transcript

"TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns for Expert Village. I'm going to talk to you about time budgeting in your home video post-production studio. Time is money as I said before. Time budgeting is very important, especially when it comes to distractions. When you're budgeting your time, you want to make sure that you're not overextending yourself or putting in way too many hours on a project where you're only contractually obligated to put in a certain amount. It's very easy to get involved on a project, especially in an industry like this which is creative by nature. As an editor, it's very easy to spend two, three, five hours on ten to twenty seconds of video, but when the client is expecting a full video which is going to be three minutes in length, you've already used up too much time on a little portion and now you're going to have to really rush through the rest of your project. This means you could be sacrificing the quality, the pacing, and the overall look of the video by the end. And the ultimate goal, obviously, is to impress them and leave them wanting more so they'll call you up for the next job again. Time budgeting is one of the most difficult things to get your head around, and it does take a lot of personal experience and at least one or two or three projects with one specific client to really know what you're in for. I would make estimates very liberally so that if you get things done ahead of schedule, you feel like you accomplished something, and you got it done ahead of time, and now you know for the next time."