Questions people actually ask

How much does a corporate video cost in South Africa?

It depends almost entirely on shoot days and deliverables, so anyone quoting a flat figure before hearing the brief is guessing. A single-interview internal film shot in a morning and cut from one camera is a different job to a multi-location case study with a crew, and the two are priced nothing alike. What is fixed is the post: freelance editing, compositing and motion graphics are charged at R6,500 per day. For a full production, send the brief and you will get an itemised quote covering crew, kit, shoot days, post and every deliverable, so you can see exactly what each part costs.

What is the difference between offline and online editing?

Offline is the edit proper: choosing takes, finding the structure and cutting the story until picture is locked. It is usually done with lower-resolution copies of the footage so the timeline stays responsive, and it is where nearly all the creative decisions happen. Online is everything after the lock: relinking to the full-resolution material, conforming the timeline, compositing and clean-up, titles and graphics, the colour grade, the audio mix, and the export of the final masters. Splitting them matters because changing the cut after the online means redoing finishing work that was already signed off.

How do you work with clients in different time zones?

Asynchronously by default, which is what makes it work. Cuts go up for review with timecoded comments, so feedback lands in one place rather than across a thread of emails, and I work through it while you are asleep. A day's work is delivered by the time your morning starts. Standing calls are scheduled in your working hours rather than mine, and for teams in Dubai and India the overlap with South African hours is wide enough that most days need no compromise at all. For European and UK clients the overlap covers a full working afternoon.

What is your turnaround time for a corporate edit?

A straightforward corporate edit — one shoot day of material, a clear brief, an interview-led structure — is a first cut in two to three working days, with each round of changes turned around inside a day. Longer-form work, anything with significant animation or compositing, or projects where the script is still moving take proportionally longer, and you will get a schedule with the quote rather than an estimate that slips. Genuine deadline work can be taken on at short notice depending on what is already booked; ask before assuming it cannot be done.

Can you work within our agency's existing pipeline?

Yes, and it is most of what freelance work is. That means your project structure, your naming convention, your bin hierarchy and your review platform, not mine. Premiere Pro and After Effects projects come back matching the template you sent, with media management done so that the project opens on your machine without a hunt for missing files. If you work in a shared storage or cloud workflow, I will work in it. If you need the project handed over mid-flight to your own finishing team, it will be organised so they can pick it up without a phone call.

How do you handle large file transfers internationally?

Rushes come in whichever way suits you — a managed transfer service, your own cloud storage, or a drive couriered for genuinely large volumes. Nothing is sent over a consumer file-sharing link. Once the material is here it stays on local storage with a second copy, so no part of the job depends on a download completing. Reviews are streamed as compressed cuts rather than shipped as full-resolution files, which keeps the feedback loop fast regardless of the bandwidth at either end. Final masters are delivered by whatever route your delivery spec calls for.

Do you use AI in post production, and how?

Yes, for the parts of the work that are mechanical rather than creative. Transcription and text-based rough assembly, speech clean-up and background noise removal, rotoscoping and masking passes that used to be traced by hand, upscaling and frame interpolation on older material, and clearing unwanted objects from a plate. What it is not used for is the decisions: the structure of a cut, the choice of take, the shape of a story. Every AI-assisted pass is checked frame by frame like any other, because the failure modes are subtle and a tool that is right ninety-five percent of the time is still wrong at twenty-four frames a second.

What deliverables do I get at the end of a project?

A full-resolution master in the codec your delivery spec asks for, plus every version the brief called for: broadcast and online cuts, aspect-ratio versions for social, subtitled and clean-text versions, and cutdowns. Alongside those you get the caption files, a still frame or two for thumbnails, and on request the project file and a media-managed archive of the assets, so the job is not locked to one editor. Nothing is held back as leverage. If a deliverable is needed later that was not in the original list, it is quoted on its own rather than requiring the job to be reopened.

Something not answered here?

Rates are set out on the pricing page. For how the work runs day to day, see freelance post production, remote post production or turnkey production. Anything else, just ask.