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Often when we look at a Real Estate Video or any video for that matter its very easy to see whether we like or dislike it.

However it is often useful for us to learn what went into the making of the video in terms of gear used, challenges, pricing and so on. I recently did the video below for a client and thought it would useful to break it down to show you gear used, issues, pricing and so on.

The Video

The Client brief

To me this is often the most critical part of your video production process and can make or break the success of your video.

As I often preach in my Real Estate Video Bootcamp course I always ask my client (usually the Realty agent) “What are we selling?”

In this case it was the views to the mountains and the modern architectural style of the home.

It is then simply your job as the videographer to show that in your video and you should come away with a happy client!

I also asked the client whether they wanted a more formal or modern pacey style to the video and they wanted a upbeat pacey style. This led me to shooting it exclusively on the handheld gimbal.

Equipment Used

Panasonic GH5
Panasonic Leica 8-18mm lens
Panasonic Leica 12-60mm lens
Moza Air Gimbal
DJI Inspire 2 with X5S running the Olympus 12mm lens
Shot in NTSC 1080 60p using the Natural Picture profile with Contrast, Sharpness & Saturation dialed back.
Music from Artlist.io

The biggest change for me in this shoot is I actually shot the whole job in the NTSC video format and not my usual Pal format which is the native format to New Zealand.

I did this as I wanted to shoot in 1080 60p on my GH5 on the gimbal and edit it on a 24p timeline. This would enable me to use a 2.5 slow motion effect 60p/24p = 2.5

If I was shooting in my native Pal 50p format on a 1080 25p timeline I can only get a 2 X slow motion effect. That sounds all very techy I know.

The risk was thou shooting in a NTSC frame rate in a Pal country is that you can sometimes get light flicker in your shots due to our different power (50hz power).

However I didn’t get any light flicker or problems when shooting.

Shooting & Editing Time

It took me approximately 1.5 hours to shoot and 1.5 hours to edit and upload for client approval.

Issues

We are in mid winter here in New Zealand at the time of shooting this video which means we get a very low but soft sun. This leads to very contrasty light inside the house with bright sunlight and shadow areas which can be tricky to expose correctly for.

The other problem with shooting at this time of year here is that the south side of the properties is very dark and often covered with frost which is not what the client want to see in the video.

I concentrated my drone shots pretty much exclusively to the North sunny side of the property.

Another issue I had here was that this property was situated near a skydiving operation and drone permissions were only granted when the skydiving plane wasn’t airborne. I had to liaise with both the local airport and the skydiving operation and only had a 1 hour window when they weren’t flying at 12:30pm!!

Price

This job I did for a new reduced post COVID19 pricing structure and did it for NZ$650 (approx US$420) including the drone stills.

Client Happy?

I had to do one small change in the video and add in an extra view shot but the client appeared to be happy with the result and signed it off.

I have been losing work from this client to a competitor who charges almost half of what I do and includes the stills pictures as well and he actually does a good job. I don’t wish to get into a price competition with this competitor so I am sticking to my guns with my pricing and product and will see how it pans out.

Was I happy?

As I mentioned above it was a bit of an experiment shooting in the NTSC format so I could get the 2.5 slow motion effect. To my eye it was ok but I can see a little bit of jitter or not as smooth slow motion as I’m use to getting when shooting in my normal frame rates.

This could be the result of stretching the slow motion 2.5 times and playing it back on a 24p timeline!

At the end of the day I was satisfied with the video but not thrilled about it.

I find the craft and art of video production is one of those things where we are never fully satisfied with our results and the job is never really finished. There is always something we could tweak when editing or do differently next time but that is the nature of the beast and I believe we just have to accept that and move on.

As always if you have any comments or thoughts leave them below.

Happy Shooting.