Most video production companies do not suffer from a volume issue; they suffer from a handoff issue that appears to be a volume issue. The editor was not slow, the brief had sat in an inbox for two days prior to someone assigning it. The client did not appear difficult, the feedback came in across four Slack messages, one email, and a voice note. No one aggregated or summarized the client’s input until the editor opened the project file. When you add together enough of these small, unnoticeable slowdowns, it may cause a company that could easily produce 80 videos per month to struggle with producing 40. And most likely, all parties will assume that the solution is to hire another editor.
Often times the best solution is the operational system under the work, i.e., the four stages (intake, assignment, review, delivery) every video production order flows through as well as the handoffs between those stages. This is where your actual volume will disappear. In addition, getting this correct is not a nice-to-have. If a production company can develop a successful operational system for managing orders from beginning to end, then the company should be able to accept new clients without having to sacrifice capacity from existing clients.
In fact, the larger a production company grows, the more important developing a clear operational system becomes, not less. A two person production company can keep its entire operational flow in someone’s head, “Who is editing what?” “Which client do I need to get back with?” “What jobs am I stuck on?” As soon as a production company reaches 5-10 concurrent clients, keeping track of all of the above in someone’s head becomes impossible. At that same moment, production companies that lack a clear operational system begin missing deadlines that were easy to meet just one year ago. Although, nothing changed regarding the quality of work performed by either party.
The Four Phases of Production: Structuring an Efficient Creative Workflow and Workflow Process
All video orders (regardless of size) go through the same four phases. Identifying who owns what, what goes in, what goes out, and how long it should normally take will help identify where your shop’s process is losing time.
|
Stage |
Owner |
Input |
Output |
Typical Delay |
|
Intake |
Account/project manager |
Client brief, assets, references |
Structured job ticket with scope defined |
1–2 days (often stalls waiting on missing assets or an incomplete brief) |
|
Assignment |
Production/traffic manager |
Job ticket, editor availability |
Job assigned to a specific editor with a deadline |
Hours to 1 day (stalls when no one owns capacity planning) |
|
Review |
Client + internal reviewer |
Draft cut, structured feedback |
Approved cut or consolidated revision notes |
2–5 days (the single biggest source of delay in most shops) |
|
Delivery |
Editor/production manager |
Approved cut |
Final files in delivery spec |
Hours (stalls when export specs weren’t confirmed upfront) |
Where the Job Really Begins: The Intake Process
The intake process is how a client’s request is turned into something tangible (a real job) and how much of the down-stream delays are put in place during intake. A client who does not provide a locked script, needed assets or a clear run time will not lose their job today; but will lose their job on day 2, while an editor is in the middle of cutting and needs to take a break from editing to ask a question that should have been asked at intake. Here, the owner should be one person: an account or project manager who ensures the client provides everything required by the job prior to moving it to assignment, not after.
An additional discipline you may want to implement at this phase is a short list (checklist) that outlines what you need to confirm prior to moving your job to assignment. This list should include items such as; run-time, aspect ratios, voice over or on camera talent, confirmation that all required source assets are available and accessible to the assigned team member(s), delivery date/deadline and delivery specs. All of the above items are not difficult to obtain. What is difficult is obtaining all of the above information prior to allowing a job to advance past the intake process. That is why using a checklist versus relying on memory is so important. If a job cannot pass the checklist, do not allow the job to move to assignment. Go back to the client and identify (by name) the specific items that need to be addressed prior to advancing. This would save both you and the client time and energy.
Assignment: Matching the Job to the Right Editor, Not the Free One
Assignment is generally a capacity planning issue masquerading as a schedule planning one. At many small shops, assignment has no owner due to reliance on “whoever is free.” This method will work well enough until you hit high volumes and then whoever is free becomes far less obvious when five editors are handling twelve jobs in a variety of stages of completion. In order to prevent the assignment phase from becoming the holding pattern for jobs waiting to move forward, you need to assign jobs to the correct editor based upon the type of job, not simply to an available editor.
An example would be if an editor was very good at creating fast turnaround social content but not nearly as strong on producing long form branded pieces with complex storylines. Assigning solely based upon availability versus skills, will tend to create additional revisions, essentially turning delays back toward the Review Stage rather than eliminating them during the assignment phase. A brand file – the client’s guidelines, previously approved cuts and style preferences held in one reference – is what makes that matching possible across a bench of editors, instead of depending on whoever happens to have worked the account before.
Review: Why Scattered Feedback Costs More Than Slow Editing
While each stage within the video production pipeline can contribute to lost time, if there is a stage that contributes to lost time more often than any other stage, it is this stage. The reason is simple: feedback provided throughout the pipeline via email, slack, and/or verbally during calls does not merely slow down the editor, it creates uncertainty regarding versions, potentially causing the editor to lose track of which version the last set of changes applied to; and multiple stakeholders providing conflicting input that had not been reconciled prior to the edit.
The solution is not to ask clients to provide more organization. Instead use a review process that organizes feedback by design. Organize feedback by tying frame-accurate comments to specific timestamps and versions, routing all of that information to a single location, and having all of that information go through one round of consolidation prior to reaching the editor, as opposed to trickling in note by note.
Additionally, this is the first instance in which tools become truly important. It is worth naming the elephant in the room. According to SparkToro audience research, Frame.io is this audience’s #1 visited website, by a large margin over any competitor. That is not an accident. Frame.io solves two major issues associated with the review stage: frame-accurate commenting and version control; and provides integration with Adobe Premiere, solving two common failure points associated with the review stage.
If your review process consists of sending out scattered emails while your competition is utilizing a review tool designed to avoid scatter, that difference will ultimately appear in delivery times. That is why it is named here rather than written around. Regardless of whether a shop utilizes Frame.io or some other tool integrated into a larger video review and approval workflow; the core concept remains the same: one round of review; one centralized source; comments include timestamp and version number.
Delivery
This is the stage that never should be the bottleneck by the time you’ve got approval on your cut; delivery is supposed to be automatic: export to specs, deliver, done. Almost every single time this doesn’t happen, the reason is that there was a missing piece of information upstream: the delivery specifications (what codec are we using, what’s our aspect ratio, are we including captions, etc.) were never confirmed in the intake process, which means now the editor has to either re-export or reformat their cut at the last second. A delivery stage delay will virtually always be an intake stage failure dressed up as something else.
Diagnosing Hand-Offs: Where Jobs Wait Between Stages
These are the four stages of the process that jobs go through (and where actual work occurs). The three hand-offs between these four stages, are where the work will wait. Waiting is as invisible as an active process. That is why we tend to underdiagnose waiting.
From Intake → Assignment. When a completed brief is available, but nobody is currently checking the intake queue, or when the traffic manager does not know which editor has available space to pick-up the assignment. An easily accessible and viewed queue of all assignments available for editing will provide visibility to all users of what is ready for assignment.
From Assignment → Review. It is easier for this hand-off to stall than the previous one. Much of the delay here is created within the editing stage, either due to a missing asset, or an editorial decision is being questioned without a quick method to obtain confirmation. A named point of contact (available five days a week) for all questions related to editing during the production phase, with an expected same day response, will prevent an editor from spending two days waiting for a question that can be answered in 30 seconds.
From Review → Delivery. This is where jobs hide the most time. “Approval” is frequently vague. Approved by whom? And did that person have final authority? A project that has been technically approved by one member of a stake-holding group, but then reopened by a different member of that same group one week later, is not a delivery-phase issue. It is an undefined approval chain that existed within the review-phase. Defining a single final approver (in writing) at the beginning of a project, rather than after the fact, will keep this hand-off from silently re-opening.
As previously stated, there are common reasons across these three hand-offs that are worthy of being called out specifically, they fail when no one is responsible for making sure that jobs transition from one stage of the process to the next. Only responsibility exists for completing the individual stages. For example, a production manager may own the “editorial” stage, and an account manager may own “client relationships”, and although each may be performing their responsibilities exceptionally well, a specific job may sit untouched for two days. No one owned the cross-over moment between those two stages.
There are many ways to correct this. Writing down, prior to starting a project, whose responsibility it is to recognize when a job is complete and should be moved forward into the next stage and/or who actually moves it forward into the next stage.
When to Hire Another Editor vs. Use Outside Help
Every business has to ask itself at some time: Do I need to hire another editor or send all my additional work to an outside service provider? This is a serious financial decision and the data will show you the break-even point much better than your gut feeling.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage for film/video editors was $75,420 as of May 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook) which is the salary price tag, not the total cost. Adding on top of the salary, you have costs for: Employee benefits; Equipment; Software licenses; Training ramp-up; And Management overheads. A full-time hire in-house typically adds up to be between $80,000 to $130,000 in true total annual cost (DeskTeam360, “Why I Outsource Video Editing”), a lot higher than the nominal salary amount.
Now, this cost is only justified by having consistent, high-volume, and predictable output, generally speaking around the point where your company is doing 50+ complex videos per month, with an annual production budget of greater than $150,000. Lower than this level, the numbers favor going with outsourced capacity: Companies who produce somewhere in the 10-40 videos-per-month range, utilizing subscription-based outsourced editing instead of an in-house hire, are likely seeing a 50-70 percent reduction in costs compared to employing a person in-house, while maintaining their turn-around times (DeskTeam360, “Why I Outsource Video Editing”).
So in short terms, the tipping point is not whether you can afford to hire someone, it is whether your monthly volumes are consistent enough from month-to-month to fill up that employee’s calendar.
An example would be if you hired a person making $100,000+ a year, fully loaded, and they were only working at a part-time capacity due to low volumes during slower months. Then, hiring them is probably a bad choice. The opposite situation exists when you use variable-priced outsourced capacity. It will scale back in the off-season when volumes drop-off and scale-up without needing a hiring cycle when volumes increase. The reasoning behind why a white-label video editing arrangement is so attractive is that it allows you to rent access to editing capacity for a fixed monthly fee, without having to incur the ongoing expense associated with a full-time employee, or the risks of hiring someone that may not meet your expectations. This is exactly how companies determine what size white-label video editing contract to sign, based upon their current actual volume and not a headcount determination made based upon potential volume that may never materialize.
Scaling the Creative Process Without Adding Headcount
The methods mentioned above will never be a quick fix. It is the shops that continually reach their volume goals that have taken a consistent approach to workflow as an infrastructural piece of the overall process, i.e., having a defined intake process; naming ownership at each stage of the workflow; a review process that does not rely on any particular client’s organization for completion; and confirming delivery specifications prior to beginning production (not post-production). This is how a shop can grow its volume and not add proportional amounts of headcount. This is also why hiring versus outsourcing is such a simple decision when using this method, because the bottleneck is no longer “we need more people” but now becomes apparent as simply which stage or hand-off point needs to be improved.
Many teams that run high volumes develop systems to manage these issues in conjunction with other team members via shared systems (i.e., some form of video project management software), i.e., tools that make intake, assignments, and status visible to all team members simultaneously instead of being held individually within the minds or email inboxes of various individuals. While the actual tool used may matter less than the discipline it forces upon the team, e.g., nothing proceeds to the next stage in the workflow until the previous stage has produced whatever is required of it.
It is much easier to understand than explain in theory what the implementation of this methodology would look like as well as what the actual results are to a shop’s throughput once this methodology is implemented, our case studies provide several examples of actual teams that developed their own intake-to-delivery methodologies and achieved significant increases in volume while not increasing the number of employees.
FAQ
What is the largest bottleneck in a video production workflow?
The review is the greatest bottleneck as compared to other stages of production by a very large margin. Unorganized, non-sequential, client feedback produces confusion regarding versions and requires several additional iterations to resolve issues that could have been addressed through a centralized, time stamped review process in one iteration.
Who should manage the creative workflow at a video agency?
There should be a person who has responsibility for managing the workflow at each level, generally this will be an Account Manager or Project Manager for Intake, Traffic/Production Manager for Assignment and there should be an Internal Reviewer along with a Final Approver designated by the Client for Review and Signoff. This is where workflow fails the quickest if you do not assign ownership for each level.
Is Frame.io valuable for use with a small video team?
For Teams that consist of clients and have recurring review cycles, Frame.io provides comment and version tracking that are accurate to frames. These are the two most costly failure points of time wasted, lost feedback and version confusion. If your team does not have complex review processes, smaller teams may not require the entire range of features provided by Frame.io, however, the discipline that it enforces (one round, one location, one version) is something that you should replicate regardless of what tool(s) provide these capabilities.
At what point per month justifies hiring an in-house editor for video editing services?
Based on the approximate costs of salaries, benefits, etc. … hiring an in-house editor begins to make sense based upon an average of 50+ complex edits per month and an average production budget that can support approximately $80,000 to $130,000 in fully loaded annual cost. Less than that amount, capacity from external sources (e.g., outsourced or subscription-based) will often deliver similar turnaround times at less cost and greater flexibility.
Can outsourcing produce a faster result than hiring?
Yes… quite often not due to the fact that outsourced editors are faster, but due to the fact that onboarding an outside partner generally takes days whereas hiring a full-time employee will take weeks/months before they reach maximum productivity. For volume requiring immediate growth vs. future quarterly growth, outsourced capacity is usually the fastest route to increasing volume.
How do I quickly identify where my workflow is slowing?
Stamp the time stamps of all the stages in a few real recent jobs (When the Brief Was Received, When It Was Assigned, When First Draft Went Out, When Approved, When Delivered). In looking at the gaps between the Time Stamps (not feelings), you will likely discover where your true bottleneck is. More likely than not, it won’t be where you thought.
