Videographer or Production Company?
Episode 1 of 10
The wrong question is which one is better. The right one is how many people your job actually needs.
More on this: corporate video production.
Transcript
Every week somebody asks us whether they want a videographer or a production company, hoping one of them is the right answer. Neither is. They’re different tools, and picking wrong in either direction costs you.
A videographer is usually one person. They shoot, they edit, they own or rent their kit. For an interview, an event, a straightforward promo, that’s often exactly right, and if somebody tells you otherwise they’re selling you something.
A production company is a team of specialists. A writer, a director, a shooter, an editor, a colourist, and on a bigger job that’s six people before anyone turns a camera on. That structure exists because certain jobs need it. Sets that have to be built. Precision shots that take real logistical planning. Anything where five things happen at once and each one needs a person watching it.
Quality isn’t what separates them. What separates them is how the job behaves when it gets complicated.
Hire one person and you get speed and flexibility. Last minute change? They just do it. Nobody has to be told. But you’ve also got a single point of failure, and their post-production ends where their own skills end.
Hire a team and you’re slower to turn on a sixpence, because a bigger crew means predefined processes. What you get back is depth. Sound design, colour, motion graphics, animation, and the ability to run several projects at once rather than queuing behind each other.
So don’t ask which is better. Ask how many things have to go right on the day, at the same time, for this to work.
If the answer is one or two, one person can hold that. If it’s six, you want a team, and if you hire an individual for it you’ll spend the difference anyway in reshoots and delays.
There are two more differences worth knowing, and one of them is the opposite of what people assume.
The first is scheduling, and everybody gets it backwards. You’d expect the solo videographer to be the flexible one, and on the day itself they are. Last minute change of plan, they absorb it.
But ask both for four shoot days across a busy month and the company often wins, because a company can put a second crew on it and one person can only be in one place. Agility on the day and availability across a quarter are different things. Clients buy for the first and get hurt by the second.
The second is what happens after the shoot. Most solo shooters edit their own work and edit it well, and the ceiling is their own skill set. A team gives you a colourist, a sound designer, someone who does motion graphics for a living. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your film needs any of it. Plenty don’t.
And if you’re producing on a cadence rather than once, that changes the answer again. A monthly social retainer at a modest production value is close to ideal for one person who knows your business, because the overhead of briefing a team every month eats the budget. Something running across several projects at once is the opposite.
We do both, which means we’ve watched clients get this wrong in both directions. The expensive mistake is hiring a company for a job that needed one person with a camera and a good ear.
We’re Luma Creative, a video production company in San Francisco. If you’ve got something coming up and you want a straight answer on what it takes, we’re at lumacreative.com.