Post Production Vendor Management

There are two main challenges with creating this report. First, if you don‘t have a tool that can automate the data capture process, this type of report may simply be too involved to create manually. Second, in order to track if an asset was “rejected” or not, we need to know how many times it has been reviewed previously. If you send a set of images to your post vendor, and you have to reject and mark them up three different times, you really want your tracking to reflect three rounds of rejection. It doesn‘t matter that it‘s the same set of images - after all, your goal should be zero rounds of rejection from a post vendor who knows your needs!

So, how do we keep track of every single image and how many rejections have taken place? This is where Event Tracking comes into play. Event tracking is exactly what it sounds like and it is built into sophisticated software. Events are really anything that happens to a particular image, product records, sample, or other item your tools are tracking. For a sample, events are things like “Sample Created” or “Sample Location Updated” or "Sample Returned." When you‘re using a modern piece of software, hundreds of little events like these are tracked every time actions take place, creating a bounty of useful data for reporting. In the context of post production, some examples of events are: Asset Shot, Asset Approved, Retouching Begins, Retouching Complete, Asset Approved, Asset Rejected - you get the idea.

With software capable of event tracking, it‘s incredibly easy to just create a report on image rejection rates. The total number of asset rejections divided by the total number of assets submitted to post-production will provide you with the Rejection Rate (as a percentage).

This report is an important one, whether you retouch in-house or use a vendor. On the surface, things seem simple enough: you‘re just capturing the time between file delivery TO post production and FROM post production. But how do you measure this? This is another example of something that is effortless in sophisticated software (and kind of a drag without it). We‘ve talked previously about events, and event tracking. If your software is not capturing events like “Date/Time Delivered to Post” and “Date/Time Received From Post”, then this will be a pretty manual exercise.

Your report will be set up as a table, with each row representing one Asset. I would put the Asset Filename in the left column, followed by the Product Code, Product Name, and Date Shot. You only technically need the Asset Filename, but I always find it‘s helpful to add a few columns for context (name, job code, date shot, etc). Following this asset info, you‘ll have three more columns.

First, the Date/Time Delivered to Post. If you are using automated software with event tracking, you should be able to pull this from your BI tools. An interesting note here: back in the old days, before speed to market was king, files were often delivered to post production in a batch push at the end of a shoot day, or the end of a round of selects. These days, more people are pushing images immediately from set, or from an AD‘s selects, directly to post production. We‘re seeing retouchers working on images minutes after they were shot, which has tons of huge benefits.

Second, the Date/Time Delivered From Post. This is simply tracking when post production (or a vendor) returned the images. All the notes about event tracking apply here as well. Which is to say, this is easy if you‘ve got the tools, potentially not worth it if you don‘t. Another similarity to note here is that we‘re looking at deliveries on an ASSET level - not a whole job or folder. After all, one problematic file shouldn‘t delay a whole shoot, right? Additionally, we don‘t care as much about how long it took post (or a vendor) to complete the actual retouching (that‘s their business!), we‘re just concerned with when we actually received something back.

Lastly is the metric we‘ve been looking for: the Duration from Date/Time Delivered to Post and Date/Time Retouched Files Returned. That‘s a mouthful, but it‘s a simple calculation of time between the last two columns. Your final step is to get an average of this duration column - voila! You‘ve calculated your Average Turnaround Time for Post.