Small-time videographers have a lot of things working against them, ranging from picky clients to high startup costs to the time required to build up a client base from scratch. But all small-time videographers can leverage different tech tools and software platforms to boost their productivity.
Let’s examine how this works in more detail so your business can benefit.
Use Tech Tools for Task Tracking and Time Management
One great idea is to leverage various time management platforms and software programs to track and organize tasks. Organizing lots of different tasks and keeping your work in sync with partners or client expectations can be difficult, especially when you need to collaborate with larger teams or check in with multiple clients.
Fortunately, various communication and task tracking tools, ranging from Slack to Trello to Asana, can help you to juggle multiple projects simultaneously: a key benefit when you might need to work on editing one video project and rendering another at the same time.
Consider Outsourcing Certain Areas to Cut Down on Costs
Furthermore, you might consider outsourcing some of your nonessential work to virtual assistants. In this way, you might be a freelancer hiring other freelancers to do some work so you can spend more time on the essential stuff you really get paid for.
Fortunately, videography and video editing as a discipline includes a lot of outsource-able work, including:
- Adding watermarks to images or video footage
- Updating your website gallery or portfolio with new videos for images
- Tweaking your website’s SEO or conversion content
- Adding descriptions to videos and photos
- And more
All of this stuff can easily be outsourced to other freelancers. Just be sure to use a video contract template when specifying the terms and deliverables, as well as the price you’ll pay.
Don’t Storyboard from Scratch
These days, storyboarding your new videos from scratch is totally unnecessary. Digital templates and tools can speed up the storyboarding process significantly and help you boost your productivity across the board.
For instance, Canvas comes with hundreds of different professional templates and lots of premade elements you can use to storyboard even the most complex video projects. You can also make your own custom storyboards using tools like WonderUnit’s Storyboarder, which has you type out scenes before it draws them for you using AI.
Use AI for Automatic Captioning
Speaking of AI, consider leveraging AI tools to automatically caption your videos. Many more people these days are watching videos without sound, and many of your clients may require this with any delivered projects.
Fortunately, you don’t have to spend hours transcribing captions manually. You can instead use AI tools to transcribe your video and audio files in a snap. These tools include Trint, which is one of the most accurate speech-to-text tools on the market, and it includes an editor to boot. It even includes a free caption and subtitle extension for videos with Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
But there are other tools and easy to use for the same purpose. Overall, captioning is just one more area where technology can be leveraged to boost all small-time videographers’ output.
Use Keyboard Shortcuts
This last tip might seem simple, but it’s more effective than you might think. Keyboard shortcuts can ultimately save you up to hours or even days of productivity after just a little preparation.
Some of the most effective keyboard shortcuts for common commands in your favorite video programs can save you between 600 and 800 ms for each action. This is small by itself. But all of those add up to hundreds or thousands of clicks per day, which can save you up to several working hours of time.
When time is money, as it is in the videography field, this benefit can’t be understated.
