Make More Videos Tip: Get The Raw Footage

This is an important tip! Always get access to the raw footage ‘thrown in’.

There are loads of good reasons for this, here are my favourite 4:

1. You might want to use a different production company down the track and raw footage from a previous shoot can be liquid gold in future projects.
2. Social media snippets from a shoot can be lifted out quickly and simply by a marketing assistant using iMovie, and will often give you TRUCKLOADS of professionally shot, awesome looking Insta/Facebook content.
3. Getting the raw footage allows you to do extra bits on the day ‘while we’re here’ – see tip #5 for more about this, but this is a seriously potent opportunity to get an extra bit of beautifully produced content for social/EDM/Website/Internal/Christmas Message/Whatever-you-can-imagine
4. Making changes to the same project down the track: some production companies will clear footage from their storage systems every 3-6 months. If, 7 months after you produce your corporate video, you need to change a font or logo, doing so without the raw footage is time-consuming and tends to look rubbish – but if you can hand them back the footage and say ‘here you go, please change the logo’ they’ll love you for it, and the change will be much simpler and cheaper.

It will either cost you nothing (if it’s a cloud link) or the price of a hard drive to get your hands on these assets, and having it at your disposal can be invaluable.

BROADCAST TIP:

Some cameras operate in unique codecs which generate industrial files which entry-level video editing programs may not be able to read, so if you ask really nicely, the production company may ‘transcode’ the footage into full-resolution, easy-to-access files (like MP4s).