The Complete Video Production Checklist (Every Phase)

The expensive problems I have had to fix on a shoot were almost never made on the shoot. They were made weeks earlier, inside a decision nobody got around to making, and they surfaced on the day when the crew was standing around waiting, or later in the edit when the one shot that would have solved everything was never captured. A checklist earns its keep by dragging those decisions forward into the phase where changing your mind is free. I co-founded Moonb, I have run this loop on hundreds of projects, and this is the run I take every one of them through.

One number worth internalising before anything else: the shoot is the shortest phase of the whole thing, roughly 10 to 15 percent of the timeline, and post-production is by a wide margin the longest.

Phase 1: Pre-production (lock every decision early)

Pre-production is where a video gets good or gets doomed, so I front-load it harder than most people expect. Every item below should be ticked off before anyone so much as charges a battery, because a decision I make now costs an email, and the same decision made on set costs a whole crew standing idle while I make it.

• Brief, goal, and audience. One measurable objective, and a clear picture of exactly who this is for.
• Script. The words, locked. I do not move past this until they are.
• Storyboard. The script turned into pictures, shot by shot. I build this first.
• Shot list. Pulled straight from the storyboard: every setup I need to capture, written down so nothing gets forgotten in the rush of the day.
• Schedule and costs. Time and money mapped against that shot list.
• Casting and crew. The right people, actually booked.
• Location scout and a tech scout. I visit the space beforehand and confirm the power and the sound work there, rather than discovering on the day that the silent boardroom sits above a loading dock.
• Gear list, tested. Every item confirmed working and charged.

The paperwork that protects the shoot

These are pre-production items, not shoot-day afterthoughts, and skipping any of them is how a project gets derailed for reasons that have nothing to do with the footage:

• Location permits, physically carried on location.
• A certificate of insurance (general liability at a minimum).
• Signed talent and location releases, secured before I roll a single frame. I have watched a great interview become legally unusable because the release was going to be sorted out “afterwards” and afterwards never came.

Then a call sheet goes out before each shoot day, built from the schedule and the shot list, telling every cast and crew member when and where to arrive, what the plan is, and who to call when something moves.

Phase 2: Production (execute the plan, do not improvise)

On the day my job is to execute pre-production, not to reinvent it. The best shoots I run feel almost boring, because every interesting decision was already argued out the week before. Before and during the shoot:

• Confirm every camera is present, charged, and matched. I set resolution, frame rate, and colour identically across all of them, because footage that was shot on mismatched settings fights you in the edit and sometimes will not cut together at all.
• Set focus, exposure, and white balance by hand. Auto settings drift the moment the light shifts, and that drift always shows up when it is far too late to fix.
• Monitor audio on headphones at every single setup. I give one person the job of listening for a hum in the line or a peak that clips. Bad audio is where amateur footage gives itself away, and there is no recovering in post what you never captured cleanly, so I always pack a backup recorder.
• Light with intent. Three-point lighting (key, fill, backlight) is my baseline before I do anything fancier.
• Protect continuity. Wardrobe, props, and set dressing have to match from shot to shot, so I review the previous take before starting the next one.

Data management: the rule that saves the whole shoot

Footage you lose is footage you cannot reshoot, which is why I treat backups as the one thing on set that is never negotiable:

• Format and clear cards the night before, never mid-shoot when a wrong click can wipe a morning’s work.
• Duplicate footage the moment a card comes off the camera, and keep at least two copies alive at all times.
• Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two types of media, with one of them off-site or in the cloud.
• Back up at the end of every shoot day, before anyone goes home.

Phase 3: Post-production (finish in the right order)

Post is the longest phase and it has an order that punishes you for breaking it. Do a step early and you will redo it later, usually more than once. The sequence I hold to:

1. Transfer and back up every file (3-2-1 again).
2. Log and organise the footage.
3. Select the best takes.
4. Assemble a rough cut.
5. Gather feedback, then revise to picture lock. I only lock picture before touching any finishing, because colour and sound poured into a cut that then changes is money set on fire.

Colour, sound, and the final check

Finishing runs in its own order too:

• Colour: correction first, so the look is consistent and natural, then grading for the creative mood on top.
• Sound: editing first, meaning clean dialogue with the noise removed and effects synced, then mixing to balance dialogue against music and effects.
• Graphics: titles and lower thirds go on last, along with any captions.

Then I run a quality-control pass before export, checking that the audio holds level across the whole piece, that the colour matches shot to shot, that the captions are correct, and that the export settings hit each platform’s actual delivery specs.

Delivery: close the loop

• Export to spec for each platform, in every aspect ratio the project needs. Most jobs I deliver require several versions, so I plan the cut-downs up front rather than re-exporting a week later. Our free aspect ratio calculator takes the maths off my plate here.
• Add the metadata: title, description, tags, and a thumbnail that earns the click.
• Publish, then promote. I keep each cut as short as the message allows and put the value in the first few seconds, because attention drops the longer a video runs.

What each phase is actually protecting

When a client asks me why the checklist is worth the discipline, I stop describing steps and start describing the specific disaster each phase exists to prevent. This is the version I sketch on the call.

The one-line version

Pre-production is where you make the video good, production is where you capture it, and post is where you finish it. The checklist works because it forces every decision back into the earliest phase that can hold it, where being wrong costs almost nothing. At Moonb I run this whole loop as an embedded team, so nothing on the list falls off the edge of a busy week. If that is the part eating your time, see how Moonb works.