post-production video editing

Post-production video editing is where you’ll put the finishing touches on your video project. You can think of post-production as the glue that holds all the varied shards of your film together in one piece.

This editing stage involves aspects that are easy to understand, like clip organization and order, as well as some that are less easy to conceptualize, like mood and pacing. Let’s unpack the post-production phase of video creation and take a look at its contents and context.

What Is Video Post-Production?

Post-production is the final phase of the video production process. Beginning after filming is finished, this stage is responsible for transforming all the raw footage and other elements into a cohesive, visually engaging final product.

The post-production phase comes after pre-production and production, the other two phases of the video production workflow. Here’s a quick refresher on the three basic phases of producing a video.

Pre-Production

Before any filming or editing can be done, your video production needs a plan. The pre-production phase is where you’ll shape your production process, fleshing out the script into a storyboard and shot list, scouting locations, hiring the staff and talent, forging the production schedule, and making any other necessary preparations. Now that you have a plan, you can start production!

Production

The production phase is where you’ll shoot all your raw video footage on location or on a set. You’ll generally start production day by setting up your base, prepping and outfitting your talent, and arranging your lights, microphones, and cameras. When all your memory cards are full of epic shots from every imaginable angle, that’s a wrap!

Post-Production

Once you have all the raw materials you need, you’ll enter the post-production phase. Here, you’ll pick the best takes, splice them together in the right order, tweak the color and audio for consistency and style, possibly add effects and text, and then export the finished product. The post-production process is generally an intensely collaborative phase involving multiple people specializing in editing, color, audio, graphics, etc. This phase often involves digital asset management and cloud editing software like Avid’s Edit on Demand to facilitate remote collaboration.

The Importance of Post-Production in Video Editing

Why is post-production important in video editing? To the untrained eye, post-production can be an almost invisible craft that’s difficult to pin down. This is because the job of post-production is to highlight the message, tone, rhythm, and impact of the film while fading subtly into the background.

More than anything else, post-production is about the story. Editing tasks put clips in the right narrative order, with establishing wide shots leading to action medium shots and emotional close-ups that build to climactic endings. Color adjustments help to set the story’s emotional tone. Sound design immerses viewers more fully in the story’s world. Effects enhance the visual and audio appeal to keep your audience interested, while text graphics communicate important information.

This stage can also help promote consistent brand messaging across all your video content. You’ll be able to add your brand’s logo and make sure the video’s style matches your brand’s identity.

6 Stages of Post-Production in Video Editing

Because the post-production stage involves so many diverse tasks, video producers generally break it down into a few bite-sized stages to make it more manageable. Here are six of the most important aspects of the post-production workflow.

Stage 1 - Ingestion and Organization

Before you can start editing your clips, you’ll need to organize and import them into your video editing software.

Sorting your raw footage into an organized system will help make sure you can quickly find any clip when you need it. Give each clip a unique, descriptive file name that tells you about where and when it was shot and what’s inside so you don’t have to rely on its thumbnail to identify it. If you’re working with a large team, you might even want to include some additional metadata or relevant tags about the clip’s contents to make it easily searchable for everyone.

Create a folder structure for your project that’s clearly labeled and easy to navigate. You can sort clips into folders by date, location, version, or some other intuitive method.

When all your raw footage and other elements of your project are neatly organized, it’s time to import them into your video editing software. You’ll probably want to import everything at the same time, which you can generally do by dragging and dropping your project’s main directory into your editing software’s project files bin.

Some video post-production software will organize your project files automatically into their native file systems. Avid’s Media Composer uses an MXF system that transcodes raw clips into its own format and location to make it easier and faster to work with your individual video files containing long hours of raw footage.

Stage 2 - Editing

When all your raw files are organized and imported into your video post-production software, it’s time to start the editing stage.

Post-production editing is the process of selecting, trimming, and arranging clips.

• You’ll start by selecting the gems from your clip heap. These are generally the shots that show the most character and complexity or that contain irreplicable production values or storytelling elements.
• Next, you’ll trim the fat off your best shots, leaving only the best parts. This generally means cutting out the clapperboard at the beginning and the director yelling “Cut!” at the end as well as any other unusable or undesirable sections.
• Finally, you’ll arrange these raw fragments into a coherent story. During filming, your team will generally shoot scenes in whatever order is efficient to the schedule, actor availability, location convenience, etc., not necessarily in the correct story sequence. The post-production video editing stage is when you’ll get to see if the shot order you planned out during pre-production works in real life.

When you like the basic shot sequence, it’s time to start adding transitions between clips. You’ll usually want these to preserve the film’s flow and smooth out the audience’s viewing progression while minimizing any jarring hard cuts.

You have a number of wide-ranging tasks in this stage. This includes making sure the film is visually appealing, the pacing keeps viewers’ attention, and the story is easy to follow. You probably won’t be able to accomplish all of these in one single pass.

Your first rough cut might be too long with imprecise trimming and loose pacing, but that’s fine. You can make as many passes as necessary, trimming milliseconds here and there, rearranging shot sequences that don’t work, and tightening things up until you’re satisfied.

Stage 3 – Color Correction and Grading

Once you like your shot sequence, it’s time to move to the color adjustment stage. When editing color, you’ll go through your film clip by clip looking at both the consistency of the color and the mood or style it sets.

You’ll start with color correction. It’s hard to guarantee consistent lighting conditions on filming days, so the coloring of different shots may vary drastically. Color correction involves making sure your film has consistent coloring from one clip to the next. You can fix the exposure of certain clips, saturate certain colors, filter certain scenes, and set your overall white balance to standardize your aesthetic feel.

When your color is correct, you can move to color grading. Where color correction sets the tone, color grading sets the mood and style. This is an artistic pass where you can focus on interesting and engaging color choices or help make certain elements of the scenery or costumes pop out. Emphasizing orange can create warm skin tones, saturating the blues can turn up the drama, and drilling into the reds can bring out the action.

Stage 4 - Sound Design and Audio Editing

When you’re happy with your color’s quality and emotional impact, you can start working on your sound’s quality and emotional impact.

Low-quality sound tends to turn people off even more than low-quality visuals. In this stage, you’ll edit out background noise, adjust volume levels so nothing is too quiet or too loud, and make sure dialog can be heard and understood. If certain live dialogue sequences or sound effects are too rough, you’ll re-record them and sync them with your footage.

Once the audio quality is up to snuff, you’ll add sound effects and a soundtrack to evoke or enhance the emotional mood.

Sound effects can include:

• Turning up the background noise in suspenseful scenes
• Adding extra bass to the hits and smashes in action scenes
• Emphasizing jump scares with loud noises
• Adding crowd sounds for street scenes
• Inserting human movement sounds for quieter scenes, like footsteps, clothing rustles, prop interactions, zipper swishes, etc.

You can use music to:

• Tighten tension
• Stimulate suspense
• Create a comedic tone
• Manifest a melancholic mood
• Build to a satisfying climax
• Underline plot developments you want your audience to notice
• Draw attention to important on-screen text or graphics

Avid Media Composer integrates with Avid Pro Tools to give you some of the most comprehensive and powerful audio editing tools that exist. For example, it’s simple to export an audio clip from Media Composer Enterprise to Pro Tools, add an equalizer or compressor, and then flip it back over to Media Composer to see if the audio edits work in context.

Stage 5 - Visual Effects (VFX) and Graphics

Many videos can benefit from a light sprinkling of visual effects during post-production, including animated text and graphics. These can improve the storytelling by boosting your video’s visual appeal and injecting extra excitement. If they’re creative enough, they can also help your video stand out from its peers.

When you hear “VFX,” you might think of the dinosaurs, spaceships, and robots you’ve seen in big-budget blockbusters, but not all visual effects have to be that kind of special. Effects can include elaborate inter-scene transitions, animated title graphics identifying a speaker, enhanced product images, etc. With today’s increasingly democratized AI curve, even small-budget productions can now include formerly high-end effects like auto-filled background imagery, motion-tracking text graphics, and AI-generated animations.

Depending on the size of your film project, this stage of post-production can involve all kinds of specialist jobs to achieve the stunning, unforgettable end results you’ve seen on screen. Here are a few of the current most common ones:

• Roto artists manually trace around unwanted objects or parts of a scene so that visual effects can be overlaid on the live action. This can be done with a simple stationary shot, but if the camera moves around a lot, it can involve drawing on thousands of individual frames.
• Matte painters create unique visuals that can be added to shots in post-production. These are usually realistic wide shots of landscapes added to the backgrounds of scenes. Originally created with traditional painting techniques, today’s matte paintings generally use some digital elements and may even be animated.
• Compositors combine the original footage with visual elements from matte painters and other VFX artists into seamless shots. It’s their job to integrate the illusion with the reality and make sure the final product is coherent and believable.

Stage 6 - Export and Delivery

Finally, post-production video editing can help you deliver your film to more viewers by making the final product compatible with as many platforms and devices as needed.

Once you’re happy with your final cut, including its color, sound, and any added effects, you’ll render and compress the project into a single high-quality video file. Depending on where you plan to publish it, you may need to convert it to a specific format that you can upload to your preferred platform or view on your preferred screen size. MP4 and MOV files tend to have the greatest cross-device compatibility. Bigger screens will generally need a resolution of 1080p, while videos made for online viewing can usually get away with 720p.

This final export can often be performed automatically, allowing your video post-production software to select suitable specifications for your desired showcase, including resolution, aspect ratio, and file type.

Master the Art of Post-Production for Stunning Video Edits

The most meticulous pre-production plan combined with all the production values in the world can still churn out an incoherent mess without a post-production process to polish the final product. Whether you’re a DIY creator or a team of experts, you can take your films to the next level with a coordinated post-production workflow that invests time and creativity into the stages of organization, editing, color adjustment, sound design, effects, and delivery.

If you want to try out the industry’s standard video post-production software and learn to use the tools that set the professional video editors apart from the amateurs, download this trial version of Avid’s Media Composer Ultimate completely free for 30 days.

References:

[1] https://explain.ninja/blog/video-post-production-everything-you-need-to-know/
[2] https://www.nfi.edu/pre-production/
[3] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/learn-about-the-postproduction-process-in-film
[4] https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/honors/784/
[5] https://cyberfilmschool.com/post-production-workflow/
[6] https://cyberfilmschool.com/editing-the-narrative-short/
[7] https://colorandlight.blogs.bucknell.edu/2018/04/05/color-lesson-1-basic-correction/
[8] https://www.lafilm.edu/blog/the-importance-of-sound/
[9] https://www.nobledesktop.com/blog/intro-to-motion-graphics
[10] https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/visual-effects-vfx/compositing/roto-artist/
[11] https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-matte-painting-in-movies/
[12] https://www.iup.edu/digital/cascade-howto/images-and-video/video/video-formats-for-the-web.html
[13] https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/lshea/2.Tech_PDFs/Pixel_Fun_Aspect-NonSquare.pdf