In-House Video Editing Challenges: Resource Demands and Skill Gaps

August 24, 2024

David Aguilar

The Challenges of In-House Video Editing: Resource Demands and Skill Gaps

If you’re like me, adding employees to your company isn’t something you take lightly. With an in-house team, you (or your company) will be responsible for keeping them busy and productive. Maintaining consistent working hours puts food on your employee’s tables, which can get more stressful when they have families they’re providing for. Aside from this responsibility, here are some of the other challenges that come when you have an in-house editing team:

Fixed Costs‍

Emotions aside, employees represent higher fixed costs for your company. The most common include salaries, PTO, sick time, insurance benefits, retirement, equipment, and software. In order to minimize downtime while your editing needs are low, team members may need to be cross-trained in order to stay busy and effective. Bringing your editing team into other facets of your business operations inevitably leads to them wearing multiple hats. As time goes on, your team may continue to wear those hats, even when editing demands get high. Whenever hiring, one thing I always forget is how costly new employees are. To start, there’s the time spent putting together a job listing, vetting candidates, doing interviews, and working through on-boarding. Following that, training is a deceptively expensive endeavor. Often multiple team members’ time is being used to get the new employee up to speed, which means that their own projects aren’t getting done.

Resource Limitations‍

When taking on an in-house team, you or your company will be in charge of making sure they have what they need to get their jobs done. As noted above, all of those resources have a monetary cost, so concessions may be made at smaller companies. From a staffing perspective, an in-house team might struggle with handling multiple projects simultaneously or dealing with ones that have specialized needs. Constraints may come not only in the form of the number of team members on staff, but also in terms of having powerful enough computers (or enough of them). This can be a pain point if a project requires long render times (for playback while working or for creating the final file). Depending on what it’s rendering, that may put that computer out of commission for any other tasks, which may result in an employee with idle time.

Skill Gaps‍

Since your editing team are employees, there’s a shared responsibility to keep their skills sharp and current. Especially with the exponential growth with AI (particularly within video editing) ongoing training is necessary to keep up with new skills and software. As their employer, the task of finding training (or at least covering the costs of attendance, travel, etc) falls on you. If a team member is too specialized in a specific task, it can be challenging to keep them fully utilized when that work type isn’t available. As mentioned earlier, cross-training can lead to spreading team members thin as they become more essential in other areas of the business.

Flight Risks

‍Good help is hard to find. Keeping it is harder. As team members become more and more proficient or broaden their skill sets, they start to become a pretty hot commodity. Investing in an internal team member will always pose the risk of them leaving and taking all of that investment with them. There’s not a whole lot you can do here beyond offering them a great place to work that checks all their boxes for a long term career. Becoming too reliant on a single or select number of internal team members may result in needing to make a quick hire, or daresay, open the door to exploring outsourced options.

Now What?

Assess whether the benefits of hiring in-house are worth these risks. You can't have one without the other, so make sure you're aware that even though someone's in-house, doesn't mean they'll be there forever.

Here's a guided list of the articles in this series, but feel free to check them out in the order that makes sense to you:

At Archaius, we focus on providing our clients the closest thing to a fractional in-house team. Meaning, we want you to feel like we’re right down the hall, but only when you need us.

Reach out through our contact form if you’d like to get the conversation started.

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