Glossary

Television and radio buying works in fixed lengths: 10, 15, 20, 30 and 60 seconds. A 35-second spot is bought as a 40, so a script that will not fit 30 makes the whole campaign more expensive.

So duration is fixed at the start, not in the edit suite. Shorter versions are written alongside the main one — adding them later means calling the crew back.

Unlike the screenplay it does not deal with story but with feasibility. The shoot-day schedule and the equipment list come out of it.

It is also the document where scope is agreed. What is not in the shooting script does not get shot that day — which is exactly why it is approved before the shoot.

For commercials and animation a storyboard is the cheaper way to discover a scene does not work. Redrawing costs an hour; reshooting costs a day.

For simpler formats — interviews, reportage — it is skipped. There, a shot list in the shooting script is enough.

Its purpose is to make client and production picture the same thing. Phrases like “modern and clean” mean something different to everyone; twenty images settle it in five minutes.

It is also the yardstick at handover. When the result diverges from the approved references, there is something to point at.

Without B-roll an interview cannot be cut. Every edit in a talking head reads as a jump, while a cutaway makes it invisible — which is why more B-roll is always shot than seems necessary.

Rule of thumb: for every minute of finished video, plan three to five minutes of usable B-roll.

It has replaced dolly track and cranes for most routine shots. One person with a gimbal walks through a hall and captures a move that once meant half a day of rigging.

It works no miracles: a gimbal removes shake but will not rescue a badly chosen move or an unsteady operator. Camera movement needs a reason, or it simply makes viewers dizzy.

Log footage looks washed out and low-contrast straight from the camera — that is the intent, not a fault. Colour is finished in post, where there is time and a reference monitor.

The consequence for the client: dailies do not look like the result. Judging quality from them is pointless.

In photography RAW is the standard — retouching and colour matching across a set are done from it without quality loss. The client receives finished files; the RAW stays in the archive.

In video RAW is data-heavy and used only where the image will be worked on heavily. A routine corporate video does not need it.

This is not only aesthetics. Without grading you can see the interview was shot in the morning and the close-ups in the afternoon, and viewers register it as sloppiness even without knowing why.

For brands with a defined palette we grade to it as well — logo, product and setting should hold the same tone across every output.

European television requires −23 LUFS; streaming services and social platforms sit around −14. A spot delivered at the wrong loudness is either rejected or normalised by the platform itself — and then sounds different from what was approved.

So the mix is done per target medium, not once for all of them.

On social media it is taken up by the player interface — account name, caption, buttons. On television, by the screen’s own overscan. A caption placed too close to the edge disappears, and nobody notices until it is live.

In vertical formats the unsafe area is far larger than expected: the bottom fifth is almost always covered.

Used where precision matters — a product how-to, a regulated claim, a process explanation. The voice can be swapped without reshooting picture, which is decisive for multilingual versions.

The voice contract covers a specific use and territory. If the video is also going to Slovakia, that is known in advance and both are recorded at once.

Most people play social video muted. An unsubtitled video therefore communicates only what is visible — which, for a talking head, is nothing.

For public-sector clients subtitles are moreover an accessibility obligation, not an extra. So they are handled in the edit, not afterwards.

Cropping from 16:9 works only where the subject sits centrally and nothing important surrounds it. Otherwise half the composition is lost.

So the shoot knows in advance which setups will also run vertically, and composes with room at the sides.

The master is not edited or re-encoded for everyday use — each further encode costs quality. Web, presentation and social get derived versions.

For the client that means a simple rule: archive the master, work from the derivatives. When a new version is needed in two years, the master is the starting point.

Too low a bitrate shows as blocking in motion and crumbling detail, typically on water, foliage or crowds. Too high needlessly burdens a website and slows loading.

Social platforms re-encode video anyway. Delivering them an extreme-bitrate file is pointless — quality is decided more by how clean the source is.

It caps altitude at 120 metres, requires visual line of sight, and forbids flight over assemblies of people. The operator must be registered and the pilot appropriately qualified.

Over built-up areas, near airports and in protected zones further limits apply. So airspace is checked for every job in advance — not on the shoot day.