As a General Rule, It Takes Six Hours to Edit and Encode Every Hour of Raw Footage

As a lawyer, your time is extremely valuable, billed out to clients at hundreds of dollars an hour. That's part of the reason the process of shooting, editing, and encoding a video for your law firm can be so daunting: who has the time to learn the necessary technology and turn an hour or two of raw footage into a professional-looking video that will attract clients? The way the numbers scale out, even if you shoot your footage yourself, you'll want to hire an outside party to edit and encode it—and that's where the editing and encoding experts at Gearshift come in.

Editing Is a More Time-Consuming Process Than You Think

If you're new to the video arena, you might naively think that shooting a video and editing a video take roughly the same amount of time. However, that simply isn't true. The editing process involves a variety of steps, including:

 

  • Going painstakingly through the raw footage and marking out excerpts that are usable
  • Using a professional editing program to put these excerpts into the proper order
  • Matching lighting condition, sound volume, etc. from one excerpt to the next
  • If the video comes from multiple sources, encoding all the footage into a single format
  • At the end of the process, shaving seconds off the video here and there to bring it down to the ideal length

 

As a general rule, a professional videographer using a state-of-the-art video editing and encoding program will require six hours of editing time for every hour of raw footage shot. If we're talking two or three hours of raw footage, that's a solid day or two of work for someone who knows what he's doing—so just imagine how long it will take you if you try to tackle the editing and encoding process yourself, and how much it will cost you in billable hours!

Editing and Encoding Your Law Firm Videos Is Best Left to a Professional

At Gearshift, our editing and encoding experts know how to turn raw footage into professional-looking videos as expeditiously as possible. If you shot the footage yourself, you've already committed two or three hours to the video process. Let us take on the burden so you can get back to doing what you do best—practicing law! For a free consultation, call Gearshift today at 877-477-7883.

 

Jim Folliard
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Founder, Director, Cinematographer, Photographer & Editor