Cutting Ads From the Footage Archive You Already Own

On the last three archives we took in — a furniture manufacturer's catalogue shoots, a dealer group's walkaround library, a factory tour — usable yield ran between four and nine percent of total runtime. So the first thing that happens is not a cut. We watch and log everything and hand you a shot list with the honest number in it. Twice in the past year that log ended the engagement, and we said so in writing rather than assembling something defensible out of B-roll. The log comes before the cut: Every clip gets watched, timecoded and rated against the brief, not skimmed for pretty frames. What comes back tells you which claims the archive can support and which ones need a camera. That document is worth more than the edit to most of the clients who commission it, and it arrives inside five working days. Conform, grade, sound: Camera-native files, not the H.264 exports your last agency sent to a client. We relink to original media in DaVinci Resolve and grade from log rather than pushing an image that has already been baked. Mixed sources are the normal condition — a 2019 shoot on a C300, a phone clip a dealer principal took on a Tuesday, drone plates from a supplier — and matching them is most of the labour. Audio goes through iZotope RX before it goes near a mix: forecourt wind, factory floor hum, showroom HVAC. The mix lands at -14 LUFS integrated, true peak -1 dBTP. Reframing: Every ratio is reframed shot by shot. Automatic reframe is acceptable on a static interview and wrong on anything where the subject moves, which in automotive is every shot worth using. A 16:9 tracking shot of a car passing camera does not become a vertical by keyframing a crop box. It becomes a different, tighter shot, or it gets dropped, and the vertical cut usually ends up shorter and structurally different from the wide one. Music licensing: Per track, in your name, for the territories and the term you specify, with the licence handed over at delivery. We do not run campaign music off a subscription seat registered to us and leave you with no paper when the campaign runs wider or longer than planned. Three things we will not do: Upscale 1080 to 4K and call it a 4K master. Stabilise handheld shot at 1/50 with motion blur already baked into the frame. Rotoscope a competitor's badge out of a shot you have no clearance for. And the request that arrives most often, dressed as a note: make it look like it was shot properly. When the coverage is not there, the answer is a half-day pickup with a local crew, and we will quote that instead of spending your money hiding the gap. Outside this engagement: Principal photography. Casting, locations, drone permits — Turkish drone work needs DGCA clearance and arranging it is not something we do. Animation beyond titles, supers and lower thirds. Voiceover recording. Subtitles and language versions, quoted separately. Not the right desk for: Brands whose archive is phone footage from a trade stand. Anyone commissioning a six-minute film for the homepage; the edit would be competent and nobody would finish it. Teams whose approvals sit with a group that has not agreed what the ad is for, because picture lock is where that disagreement surfaces and it is expensive there. After the log: rough cut on approved selects, one structural round of notes, fine cut, then colour and mix. Notes arriving after picture lock get quoted rather than absorbed, because two words in the third act move the whole mix.