Case Study on Wedding Video Editing

Wedding Photojournalism Company in Chicago clears a 2 month backlog of editing 90 videos in 2 months with O2I's help.

The Client

The client is a 10 year old wedding photography company based in Chicago, Illinoi, and specializes in photojournalism. It has a team of wedding photographers and offers a variety of wedding shoot packages to make the special day of their clients memorable. The wedding shoot package includes 8 hours of coverage, a DVD master copy of the wedding, and a video highlight reel.

Situation - Business Need

The Company was outsourcing close to 1000 videos in a year, which meant it was editing approximately 3 videos per day. Despite outsourcing its video footage requirements to multiple vendors, the client was unhappy with the quality of video footage delivered by those vendors.

Overloaded with video footage due to a 2 month backlog, the client needed a partner urgently that could match their video editing needs while maintaining high levels of quality, in minimal turnaround time and at affordable rates. The client approached Outsource2india impressed by its quality of our wedding video editing services and our superb infrastructure which could handle large volumes of audio and video content.

Thus over a span of 2 months, 3 batches of video footage were outsourced to O2I. As a part of first video editing services project, 20 videos were outsourced, followed by 30 and finally 40 videos.

Challenges

The client had following requirements regarding the quality of videos they outsourced to us for editing -

• A multi-cam sync
• No jump-cuts between the scenes
• No blurred or shaky videos
• The flow of the video from start to finish should be perfect
• A 99% quality guarantee in terms of quality

The Challenges Faced During the Course of the Project

• Setting-up a shared workstation with a dedicated server, Zeon processor, 16GB RAM, 20TB hard disk, and moving data to the external hard drives regularly for backups
• Raw files were provided in MOV, MTS and MXF formats and needed to be edited and presented in final usable devices such as DVD and Blue Ray
• Both, the raw and exported files with the source and hard disc needed to be backed up and transferred between the client and O2I
• The quality of output was guaranteed at 99% for the duration of the project
• We provided 24x5 coverage for all the outsourced video projects until delivery
• The latest, licensed version of Adobe® Premier CC was used for completion of the project

The O2I Solution

In order to meet the needs of the company and ensure exceptional quality, the following steps were taken by the O2I team -

• 4 FTEs were recruited to meet the size and speed of the project
• The project was checked for quality at frequent intervals
• Full analysis of the RAW files was performed to ensure that all the editing needs are perfectly understood
• 2 weeks of training was provided to the video editing professionals as per the client's style specifications which included maintaining a specific folder structure, exporting the files under low resolution and uploading it on Media Silo
• Plural Eyes - Plug in and Adobe Premier CC were used as the latest software to streamline video editing and increase turnaround time
• Dedicated bandwidth with a range of 10-20 MBPS was allocated to the editing team
• High-end workstations allocated for the project completion
• A Dell R720 centralized server storage system with a storage capacity of approximately 18 TB and external HDD backups
• A Windows File Sharing services helped in sharing the files from the server to the client on the basis of the log-in credentials
• A supervisor to oversee the entire project from start to finish

Data security was maintained by -

• A separate server dedicated exclusively for this project Use of Secure VPN - IPsec/PPTP
• McAfee Anti-Spyware and Spam Filter used at FortiGateway level
• McAfee Enterprise Suite used for virus detection and repair
• URL filtering
• Internet access restricted with domain authentication technology

Results

With the above resources at their disposal, the client was able to leverage cost and result for the following -

• 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours of video data was obtained in a turnaround time of 16 hours
• The file transfers contained 50 weddings sent back in batches of 20 and 30, just as they were received
• We began with 3 Core I-3 processors with 4 GB RAM and wound up with I-7 processors with 16 GB RAM to finish the project by the stipulated time
• The client was satisfied with the quality and the pricing
• Outsourcing resources and services increased the client's business by 50%