In our exploration of agile post production, we’ve decided to kick off a blog series to discuss all things post, the good, the bad and the ugly. We think it’s important to shed light on the ‘challenges’ we’ve all heard of or experienced first hand, as they are too often hushed away in denial, blamed on the intern or embarrassingly blurted out at crew drinks at wrap… Unfortunately, they are a very real part of our world and have massive consequences in post. What kinds of issues you may ask?

Here are a few of our favorites:

“Our footage looked awesome on the LCD screen. It was vivid, sharp and bright… later on we realised that most of our footage was clipping and our highlights were gone”

“Our audio guy used a new recorder he wasn’t familiar with, we were so busy and didn’t realise that we weren’t getting the metadata we needed. We had the same file names with each new formatted card… can you imagine 100 “Take 1″ files?”

“It all started in the camera… having an ND6 and ND9 instead of two ND 9s was the difference between hell and heaven… our footage suffered.”

But we believe these issues can be avoided!

The pressure of looming deadlines paired with tight budgets means that compromises need to be made. Every production juggles this in the heat of the moment. The trick is weighing up all factors, having conversations with the right people and thinking about the consequences way down the line, not just the immediate.

So to begin, we want to throw it out to you – what is your worst post-production nightmare? What’s the biggest compromise you’ve had to make or what’s one you hope you never have to make? Look out for our next post where Final Post will take on a few sticky situations.