Pro edition
Delivery Schedule.
The demo shows one project's calendar as it actually ran. This is the blank instrument — 7 things agreed before a quote exists, the protocol that keeps a round of notes to a round, and the handover terms nobody writes down until there is an argument about them.
Agreed before the quote
| Field | What goes in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Live date | A real date, first | Everything else is arithmetic backwards from it. A project without one drifts by a week per month. |
| Approver | One name | Not a department. The single largest schedule variable on any job is how many people have to agree. |
| Notes windows | Two dates, blocked | Put them in the calendar in week one. Notes that have to be chased are the eleven days. |
| Deliverable set | Ticked from the table | Decided before the shoot, because the set determines the coverage. A vertical asked for afterwards is a reshoot or a compromise. |
| Shoot days | A number, agreed | Each one adds roughly four working days downstream. More footage is more edit, always. |
| Music and voice | Licensed or bespoke | Cheap and slow, or expensive and fast. It is the one line where those two trade directly. |
| Archive term | Months, in writing | How long a copy is kept after handover, and the month it is deleted. Assume nothing here. |
Feedback protocol
Five rules, none of them about being agreeable. They exist because each one has cost a real project a real week.
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Rule 1
Notes come back once, in one document
Three people emailing separately produces contradictions somebody has to resolve, and that somebody ends up being the editor guessing.
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Rule 2
Timecoded, in the review tool
"The bit near the start feels slow" costs an hour to locate. "00:14 — hold two seconds less" costs two minutes.
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Rule 3
Say what is wrong, not what to do
The problem is information; the fix is craft. "This section drags" is more useful than "cut four seconds here", because it might not be four seconds.
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Rule 4
Structural notes in round one only
Round one is a rough assembly. Notes on colour, type or music there are notes on work scheduled to be redone.
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Rule 5
Silence is not approval
A project cannot advance on the assumption that nobody objected. The schedule stops until something comes back, and the delivery date moves with it.
What moves the date
Six causes and what each one costs in working days. The worst of them — “notes late by a week” — moves delivery by +5 working days.
| Cause | Moves delivery | Whose | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notes late by a week | +5 working days | You | One for one. There is no slack built in to absorb it, and pretending otherwise is how a delivery date stops meaning anything. |
| A second shoot day added | +4 working days | Both | One day of shooting, three of edit. The ratio is the whole point of this document. |
| A deliverable added after lock | +2 working days | You | The finishing pass has to be re-run for the new version, plus captions and QC. |
| Music licence not cleared | +3 working days | Both | The mix cannot be finished against a track that might change. Clear it before picture lock. |
| Weather on an exterior shoot | +5 working days | Neither | A rescheduled day rarely lands the next week. This is the only row nobody can be blamed for. |
| A third round of notes | +4 working days | You | And a re-run of colour, sound, captions and every ratio in the set. |
Handover
| Term | Spec | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Masters | ProRes 422 HQ, plus H.264 for each platform | The master is the thing you keep. The H.264s are copies you will replace when a platform changes its spec. |
| Captions | Burned-in versions and .srt sidecars | Both, always. Burned for sound-off feeds; sidecar so the words are indexable and editable. |
| Project files | On request, at handover | Yours if you want them. They are only useful to somebody with the same software and the media, which is worth knowing before you ask. |
| Camera archive | Delivered on a drive you supply or we bill | Roughly a terabyte per shoot day. Storage is cheap; re-shooting is not. |
| Our copy | Twelve months, then deleted | You are told the month. Longer is available for a storage fee, agreed in writing rather than assumed. |
| Usage | Unlimited, perpetual, worldwide | No usage term and no renewal. This is a production service, not a licence — the distinction matters and is often blurred. |
6 things that go wrong without one
- No live date, so nothing is urgent until suddenly everything is.
- An approver who is a committee, discovered in week four rather than week one.
- Notes arriving in four separate emails, two of which contradict each other.
- A vertical requested after the shoot, when nothing was framed to survive the crop.
- Music chosen at picture lock and licensed after the mix.
- An archive assumption on both sides, discovered eighteen months later when somebody wants a re-cut.
Figures assume a single-location corporate or brand project. Documentary and event work run on different schedules entirely, and a schedule borrowed from the wrong kind of project is worse than none.