What makes for professional quality audio visual production

In this day and age, here in the Twenty First Century, the truth is that anybody can grab a camera and some assorted equipment and call themselves a professional audio visual production company. The equipment is more affordable than it’s ever been before, and you can get such a company off the ground for less money than it takes to max out a credit card, so there are more and more companies popping up, and it’s becoming more difficult to know how to sort the true professionals from the guys who made a quick trip to the electronics department and consider themselves pros.

So, in sorting out the pros from the paid amateurs, we’ll start with a definition of professionalism as it pertains to audio visual production.

For starters, professional quality doesn’t just mean professional quality equipment. When you hear the term production value, it doesn’t actually refer to how much money was poured into a given project. Rather, production value refers to how much overall value was squeezed out of the project’s budget.

As an example, consider a low key project with a budget of one thousand dollars. If the project comes out looking like it cost two hundred bucks, then it has bad production values. If it looks like it had a thousand dollar budget, well, then you got your money’s worth, but that’s about it. On the other hand, a true professional can take a thousand dollar budget and make it look like several times that much.

That’s one factor in true professionalism: The ability to make a project look and sound perfect at any budget, doing more with less. You shouldn’t have to spend allocate a six figure budget to get great looking results.

The other factor to audio visual professionalism comes down to having a, well, professional attitude.

This doesn’t just mean that your av crew is punctual or polite on the telephone. Rather, a professional attitude for an audio visual producer entails a genuine back and forth with the client. After all, this isn’t their project, this is your project. Your av people should be keeping you involved in the process from step one to the finished product.

So, true professionalism is a combination of both of these elements. In really getting your money’s worth, you are obviously going to want both, high production value and a collaborative approach to producing the finished piece. While you can always guarantee high production value by hiring the most expensive and well known company available, you’re likely to spend more than you’d like, and more importantly, you won’t get exactly what you’re after, since you’re just another job for them, and not a client that they collaborate with on the project. On the other hand, you could just go with the cheapest team available, and while they have the time to collaborate with you, you might not get the high production value you need.

So what you really need to do is make sure to interview and check out any av company before hiring them. Look at their samples, talk with them, and make sure that they understand what you’re after, and are capable of delivering it.