Clients! - please understand the editing process, It's a long one!

Infuriatingly the editing process is a long one and there is no way to cut corners. Whilst we love our clients some people  just don't understand the editing process and think a small change  is easy and quick to make when in fact even a small change takes editing, exporting rendering and upload in real-time and can be a very time consuming process.

One of our editors, Chris Newcombe pointed out that we should be educating our clients and has written a brilliant detailed explanation of the editing process for your eyes only: 

 I'll break it down into steps. Capturing, Compressing and Uploading video is a process that takes time and patience, especially as they are sequential (i.e. you need to get each stage right as they follow on from one another). It's also a very intensive process, and requires decent space to work and a solid internet connection to upload.

 Capturing:

 When capturing from an HDV device, the capture time is exactly as long as the length of the video that was recorded. One can, however, skip to the point of interest, but there is still a time consideration there. Cameras that shoot onto disk take less time to transfer, but for larger videos still require half an hour or so of transfer time per hour of footage.

 Compressing:

 Compressing videos is one of the most CPU intensive tasks your machine can perform. It therefore requires time and patience. A rough rule of thumb is that every minute of footage takes two minutes to compress e.g. a thirty minute video takes an hour to turn an uncompressed file into a compressed file ready for the web. This depends on delivery formats of course, as well as the machine performing the compression.

 Uploading:

 A thirty minute Quicktime video at 480p resolution will be approximately 500Mb depending on colour complexity and export settings. This will need time to upload, and reliable web access to guarantee there are no breaks in the process.

 Another consideration is conversion time, whether it is Youtube or Vimeo:

 * Youtube passively converts files into web-ready Flash i.e. you can begin to watch a low resolution version before it's finished converting; it simply replaces the file at a subsequent time

    * Vimeo actively converts files i.e. you can not watch a video until it is finished converting. Also, if you are not using a Pro account, your video is put into a queue for conversion before being converted. You're also limited to a 500Mb upload limit, as opposed to the 5Gb limit for Pro users.