How to Produce Corporate Video

Corporate video is one of the kinds that I’ve been doing most everyday. If you are making your own videos as a hobby, you may not have much corporate projects in hands. But if you are a video editor in a production house like myself, you will agree with me that lots of companies are searching around for quality services to produce their corporate videos.

It’s rather safe to say that every company needs a corporate video, regardless whether it’s multinational or a small one-man operation. The image a good corporate video can bring to a company is far behind what you can tell your clients verbally. And this small sales person will reside on your client’s table for quite a while reminding them your services.

Make a really good one for yourself first if you are tapping into video production business. Even if you are going to start with simple projects such as wedding videos, you still need that.

But the fact is that only a few companies actually have a corporate video. The majority either don’t realize the power of corporate video or don’t have the budget/time to produce one. It’s your task to convince them that they should have.

I must admit that it’s quite difficult to get a corporate video job if you don’t have a production house, either you own it or you work for it, to support you. It’s not because you don’t have the capability, but because normal businessmen don’t trust individuals easily.

How to market yourself in this business is out of range of this book. Yet you should know that you already have all the equipment (namely digital camcorder, video capture card with firewire port and a computer) and skills (since you have this book) to produce professional corporate video. What you don’t have is just that full gear studio to show off to your client. But the quality, especially creative side, of a video does not necessarily have direct relation to how expensive your system is.

Of course, I’m not implying that you can get a job from Microsoft someday. Big companies don’t even consider shooting on any videotapes, DV, Betacam, Digital Beta, as an option. They shoot on film. Forget about it for now.

Whatever media you use, the principles of video editing remain the same. Are you a professional video editor in a production house? Or trying to edit your first home video in basement? You will find the suggestions here helpful in some way.

Some tips and suggestions here:

Maintain the quality of image as high as possible.

Corporate clients would like to see crisp images. If you are using DV and firewire card, that would not be a big problem since your video will always remain in digital domain which means there is no generation lost from digital-analog or analog-digital conversion. If you have to go through any analog process, such as downloading to analog tapes, reduce the times to minimum. Or better, avoid it at all except for downloading the final video.

Render multilayered visuals in one go.

In any cases, render multilayered visuals in one go. Every time you render something, the image will get compressed once hence get one generation lost. If you want to add in extra layers on top of a rendered multilayer clip, re-render the whole thing from bottom again. Don’t just render another layer onto an already-rendered clip. Otherwise, your images will be getting blurrier and blurrier as you render them.

If you edit your own videos at home, you have an advantage here over other fellow editors in big production house. You run several necessary softwares and finish everything on the same computer. You have full controls over the whole production procedure.

In a production house, it’s possible that different task is handled by different people on different machines. And all these machines are not compatible with each other in terms of video file format. As a result, semi-finished product has to be transferred back and forth between workstations using videotapes. The image quality suffers.

Make the structure of your video definite.

History of the company, R&D capability, customer support, management team, mission statement… Don’t mix them up. Focus on one single topic in one segment. It’s advisable to let the audience recognize different segments clearly. After viewing your video, the audience should be able to tell the main points you want them to know.

Arrange the segments in a logical way if possible.

Some considerations are quite obvious. For example, it makes sense to talk about future vision after company’s history. Sometimes the choices are subtler.

More Video Types

Music Video
TV Commercials
Home Video
Wedding Video
TV Drama
Stage Show
Documentary Video
Showreel & Demo Reel
Online/Web Video

Corporate Video Production - Video Editing Tutorials & Tips

How to Produce Corporate Video