Streamline Your Production Pipeline

Applying this to any production process, even editing, maximizes your efficiency. What is the biggest consumer of your time? What else can you break off of that and do at the same time. What can you delegate to other personnel, crew, or even computers to do: Rendering? Exporting? Sales calls? Meetings?

Even if you're a "do-everything" production person, you need to take a careful look at your production pipeline to find innovative ways to break up multi-step tasks. This will enable you to stop pushing the days longer and longer to try to get everything done.

It may not always be possible; a multi-day edit of a long program can't really be shortened. But if you can automate ingest or export that will help. If you can send off a rough cut for approval and use the time you spend waiting for approval to tackle a few other tasks, you may save editing time. How? They may cut a section. They may have changed direction since something was shot. And so on.

Once we settle into a process, we work to make that process quicker. But here I learned that, in some cases, the process itself can be the bottleneck. Just as the shift from tape to flash-based media afforded us new efficiencies, pre-planning can have the same effect. Re-examine your production pipeline to see where your time is spent, and what you could break up, and reap the benefits of a streamlined, shortened production process.