Video Production Companies near you

Recorded music generally involves two sets of rights, one in the composition and one in the recording, and permission to use it in a video has to come from whoever controls them. Library and production music services simplify this by selling a defined licence, but the definition is the point: read what it covers. A licence for organic social use will not cover a paid advertising campaign, and a licence limited to one territory will not cover a global site.

Stock footage, motion graphics templates and sound effects carry the same kind of limits. Ask the production company for a written list of every licensed element in the finished edit, with the licence type and expiry. Then check that the term of those licences matches how long you intend to run the video. The failure mode is discovering three years in that an asset in your best-performing advertisement was licensed for twelve months.

Video without captions is one of the barriers the Department of Justice names in its web accessibility guidance, alongside missing alternative text and poor contrast. For a business publishing video on its own site, captions are the single most consequential accessibility deliverable, and they are cheapest to produce at the same time as the edit.

Ask for burned-in or sidecar caption files as a named deliverable, not an extra. Add a transcript, which helps search engines as well as viewers and gives your content team something to reuse. Where audio carries information the picture does not, or the picture carries information the audio does not, consider a described version. If the video will be used by a government client, the applicable standards become explicit: Section 508 for federal agencies, and WCAG 2.1 Level AA under the 2024 ADA Title II rule for state and local government content.

Aerial footage is not something a crew can simply take. Commercial drone flights in the United States are flown by certificated remote pilots under the FAA's Part 107 framework, aircraft must meet remote identification requirements, and operations such as flying over people or working in controlled airspace involve specific FAA waivers or airspace authorisations. Ask to see the pilot's certificate and the authorisation for your location before the shoot day.

On the ground, ask what insurance the production company carries and whether your premises are covered while a crew is working there. General liability is the minimum; equipment cover, hired auto and workers compensation for crew are the usual additions, and some venues will not let a crew in without a certificate naming them. If you are filming in an operating workplace, agree who controls access and who stops the shoot if something becomes unsafe.