How to Develop In-House Video Competency, Part 1: Studio Setup
In this five-part series, we'll examine all the elements you need to consider when developing an in-house video competency at your business or organization, beginning with studio setup in Part 1, then moving on to staffing, investment, gearing up,, content and marketing strategy, and concluding with the elements of a video publishing program that you should continue to outsource.
My company, videoBIO, is designed to make video easy for corporations. We’ve been doing video across North America for seven years now. We have more than 500 contracted videographers and producers in the field that shoot onsite for our projects. Using cloud-based applications, we handle all of the pre- and postproduction internally from our Toronto office.
One of the biggest growth areas that we've seen in our business in the last three years is watching our clients build in-house production teams, and bring in-house a lot of the production work that our contractors have traditionally done for them. Fortunately, we’ve built our business model with the flexibility to support our clients however they want to work with us. In most of these cases, we continue to do pre-production for them and they do the production internally. Often, we work directly with companies, teaching them how to bring the whole competency in-house.
We regard this as a natural shift in the market because so many more companies are starting to create more video organizationally. Naturally, companies are not going to want to just pay outside vendors to do the video work; whenever possible, they're going to bring that competency inside.
How can you develop your own effective in-house team? In this article, we’ll answer that question with attention to all the angles you need to cover: production, resources, investment, technology, content, and outsourcing.
Video Production
There are a lot of elements involved in building an in-house video competency. We’ll look at video production first, exploring how to building a studio and some of the equipment you'llwant to consider.
I don't know if some of those questions raised in the video clip above have resonated with you in your process of creating an in-house video competency, but two key factors for any company developing in-house video capability are studios and setups.
We see all kinds of clients who ask us, "Look, I just want to start creating more video internally, where do I start? What kind of studio do I need to create? How much should I be investing in that studio?" Depending on what you can afford and what you want to accomplish, there are a couple of different levels of studio you can build. We’ve worked with a broad range of organizations from large to small. We work with companies such as Microsoft and Price, Waterhouse, Cooper who have studios in multiple cities, and $100,000-$200,000 studios. We also work with real estate brokers who are creating a studio right in their brokerage and want to start working right from their desktop.
Related Articles
This final installment of our 5-part series on in-house video is focused on outsourcing. What functions or roles should you consider to outsource to vendors after you bring much of your video competency and production in-house?
In this 4th segment of our series on developing in-house video competency we'll look at content production and strategic issues surrounding it: How much content should could you be creating and what types?
In this segment of our 5-part series on best practices for in-house video operations, we'll focus on cloud-based technologies for multi-point content creation and distribution.
In this second segment of our 5-part series on best practices for developing an in-house video operation at your organization, we'll look at staffing needs and the level of investment you should anticipate as you build your video program.