For larger companies considering regular corporate video production needs, sometimes the volume of work makes a company think about hiring a full-time video production professional to tackle all of the company’s needs at a fixed yearly rate. Companies may figure that by hiring a video professional, they will eliminate markup costs that a production company incurs and be able to produce more video content for a variety of areas of company need. While there are advantages of such an approach, taking into consideration all of the drawbacks involved as well is important before reaching a final verdict.

If a company requires a great volume of video production annually, the first consideration is whether you can find one person to tackle it all or whether you would need to hire a small team of professionals. While plenty of people can both shoot and edit video footage competently, very few people are experts at both. To be great at anything requires total dedication, which nobody can give to one craft if they’re splitting their time between multiple jobs. On the flip side, if the video work is fairly simple and straight-forward, a competent professional can do it all themselves and not have the work suffer in quality. For basic videos posted to the company’s YouTube channel to engage customers and draw new customers, such an approach could work fine.

For creating high end marketing videos on a company’s homepage, though, a team of professionals will always be required, which means your staff production person would supervise the hiring of a full crew. If the production employee is more of a producer role, they’re less likely to be technically savvy enough to manage small shoots by themselves and supervise large shoots with extensive crew needs.

Another consideration is geography of video production. If you’re a national company or regional company with locations and offices throughout many states, you’ll have to budget for hotels, airfare, car rentals, and meals for flying your production professional to numerous locations to shoot. A nationwide corporate video production company like JLB Media Productions already has videographer assets in almost every major U.S. city. There are no travel costs. When sending your videographer to distant locations, he or she won’t be able to take all of their gear, either, at least not without incurring significant shipping expenses. Without all of the proper gear, the video professional will be stuck arranging rental equipment in numerous cities, many of which have limited resources for video rentals.

If you hire an in-house video professional, also expect to spend a large chunk of money acquiring the means to production. At minimum, you’ll need to purchase a solid HD camera, a lighting kit or two, professional audio gear, a nice tripod, and a higher-end computer for video editing plus the necessary software and plug-ins to enhance the footage. While many video professionals own their gear, expecting to hire an employee and have them use $10,000+ of their own gear for the company is unrealistic without additional compensation of some sort. If any of the gear breaks while on a company shoot, you’ll have to cover the replacement costs or face an unhappy employee.

For a very large company with tens of thousands of employees, creating an in-house video production department with a small staff to handle social media videos, “how to” videos, customer engagement videos, in-house training videos, and events makes a lot of sense. The need for high volume video creation is immense and having a staff that understands corporate culture and the products & services offered is valuable. Even most large companies, though, outsource their highest budget, national work to advertising agencies and other high level creative talent. For other companies considering hiring just a single video producer, the risk is ending up with a lot of “good enough” videos and unexpected travel and gear expenses that makes the whole decision to produce in-house feel like the wrong one.