Workflow consulting: what a review of your production routine covers
A plain account of how our workflow consulting runs for broadcast teams, from the first conversation about planning through to delivery, and what a team can expect to hold in its hands at the end.
Callum Reid · · 6 minutes to read
Why we are writing about this service now
Mid autumn is when many production teams in the Highlands and beyond sit down with next year's commitments: a winter run of studio shows, festival bookings that are already filling the diary, and the first conversations about spring. It is also the point where the habits of a busy season start to show their cracks. A call sheet that grew by accident, a camera routine nobody wrote down, a delivery step that only one person understands. Workflow consulting is the part of our offer that deals with exactly this, and as the engineer who often arrives once the kit is in place, I see why it matters.
This note is an update on how the service runs at buzzynex. It describes what the review looks at, how Morag Sinclair, our production workflow consultant, conducts it, and what a team receives afterwards. It does not repeat the wider list of services, which has its own page. The aim is to let a production manager judge whether a review would help before picking up the phone, and to know what to prepare if it would.
Where the review begins: planning
Every review starts with how work is planned, because most delivery problems are planning problems that surfaced late. Morag asks to see the documents a team already uses: schedules, run orders, crew lists, technical riders and whatever lives in the shared folders. She is less interested in how tidy they are than in whether the people who rely on them agree on what they say. Two versions of the same run order, or a rider that was last updated for a different venue, tell her more than a polished template would.
From there she talks to the people doing the work. A vision mixer, a floor manager and a producer will often describe the same day in three different ways, and the gaps between those accounts are where time is lost. The planning stage ends with a short written map of how a job actually travels from first booking to the morning of the shoot, drawn from what people do rather than what the process document claims.
- Existing schedules, run orders and crew lists
- Technical riders and venue notes
- Short conversations with each role on the crew
Camera control and the working day in the studio
The middle of the review follows a production through its working day. For multi-camera shows this means watching how camera control is handed between operators, how cues reach the vision mixer, and how changes made in rehearsal find their way into the final routine. Our camera control systems work gives us a shared vocabulary here, but the review is not a sales visit for equipment. Often the most useful change costs nothing: a clearer talkback habit, a fixed order for checking shots, a single place where the cue list lives.
Where a team uses remote camera control, Morag looks at who is allowed to change what, and how those changes are recorded. I sometimes join this part when sound is involved, since monitoring and talkback are bound up with how a crew communicates under pressure. The outcome is a list of friction points, ranked by how often they happen and how much time each one takes, so that the team can decide what is worth tackling first.
From the last take to delivery
Delivery is the stage teams most often leave to the end and then rush. The review follows material from the moment recording stops: how files are named, who checks them, where they are stored, how they are handed to an editor or a broadcaster, and what happens when a late request arrives. A common finding is that several people each do a small piece of checking, and nobody owns the whole step, so errors pass quietly from one to the next.
The remedy is rarely a new system. More often it is a short checklist, a naming rule everyone agrees to, and a named person for each handover. Morag writes these in plain language and tests them against a recent job, so the team can see that they would have caught the problem that really happened. Where a change touches the studio itself, such as cable routing or the position of a monitoring point, she flags it for Fraser MacLeod's side of the business rather than guessing.
- File naming and storage rules
- A named owner for each handover
- Checks tested against a recent real job
What you receive and what we ask of you
At the end of a review the team receives a written report, kept short enough to be read in one sitting. It contains the map of how work currently moves, the ranked list of friction points, and a set of proposed changes, each marked as a change of habit, a change of document or a change of equipment. Nothing is presented as a guaranteed result; it is a reasoned recommendation from people who have watched your crew work, and you decide what to adopt and in what order.
In return we ask for a little of your time and access. Please have your current schedules and riders to hand, let Morag speak briefly to each role, and, if possible, let her sit in on one real production day. The more honest the picture, the more useful the review. Costs for the service are set out on the prices page, and the contact page is where an enquiry begins.
A note from the sound desk
I write mostly about sound, so it is fair to say why a sound engineer is introducing a consulting service. In live work, almost every problem I am called to fix on the night began as a communication problem earlier in the week: a stage plot that never reached the front of house, a changeover time nobody confirmed, a monitor mix agreed verbally and forgotten. The equipment is usually fine. The routine around it is what lets the show down.
That is why I have come to value what Morag does. A clear workflow does not make a production glamorous, but it lets a crew spend its energy on the work in front of it rather than on chasing missing information. Seen from the mixing desk in the cold light of a load-in, that is worth a good deal more than another piece of hardware.
Workflow consulting at buzzynex is a measured review of how your production moves from planning to delivery, carried out by someone who has watched crews work and who writes down what she finds in plain terms. If your team is heading into a busy winter or planning next year's events, it is a sensible time to look at the routine. Send us a few lines through the contact page and we will explain how a review would run for you.
Callum Reid
Senior Sound EngineerCallum specialises in live sound for concerts and festivals and in studio monitoring setups.