The conference ends at six. By nine the next morning the client wants a 90-second highlight reel on LinkedIn, three vertical cuts for the event’s Instagram and thirty photos for the press release.
Nothing on the day gets a second take. The CEO walks on stage once, and if your camera operator was stuck at the badge desk at that moment, the shot doesn’t exist.
Most of what decides an event shoot happens before the doors open. This checklist starts with what to ask the organizer for, then splits the crew for the day and ends with delivery and approval. Planning a studio shoot is a different job, covered in our pre-production checklist.
In short
- A week ahead, ask the organizer for the run of show, a must-have list, stage access, an audio feed, credentials, power and an upload connection.
- Give every item on the must-have list one owner before the doors open.
- Record the stage audio on a separate recorder too, and have one person own the cards for the whole day.
- Agree before the event on what goes out tonight, tomorrow and next week, and do the upload math.
- Name one approver on the client side and agree on a window for notes.
What to get from the organizer before the day
The organizer knows things you can’t find out on your own, and most of them only arrive if you ask for them by name, a week ahead.
- The run of show, final version, with the time, room and speaker of every session. Ask who sends updates on the day, because it will change.
- A must-have list with the moments (opening, CEO keynote, award handover, product reveal) and the people (speakers, VIPs, sponsors), plus a photo of anyone you’ll need to spot in a crowd.
- Stage access: where the stage camera stands, whether there’s a riser, which aisles the roaming camera can use during talks and which areas are off limits.
- The sound engineer’s name and an audio feed from the mixing desk, with the connector confirmed.
- Credentials for every crew member, including backstage and the green room if you’re doing interviews.
- Power at each camera position, and which outlets share a circuit with catering.
- An upload connection. Ask for a wired port or a dedicated network, since the guest Wi-Fi will be shared with every attendee.
- The filming notice. Organizers usually mention filming and photography in the registration terms and put signs at the entrance, and interviewees still sign a release. The wording should come from the client’s legal team, because the rules change from country to country.
- A quiet room for interviews, and the times when each interviewee is free.
Add the crew’s call times and the deliverables, and you have the call sheet for the day.
Who covers what on the day
Every item on the must-have list gets one owner before the doors open. When two people both think they’re on the keynote, nobody is at the coffee break where the sponsor wanted photos.
A typical crew for a one-day conference with one main stage:
| Role | Covers | Audio |
|---|---|---|
| Stage camera | Every talk on the main stage | Desk feed and a backup recorder |
| Roaming camera | Audience, booths, arrivals, B-roll | On-camera mic |
| Interviews | Speakers and guests from the list | Lavalier mics, quiet room |
| Photographer | Stage, networking, VIPs, sponsors | |
| Producer | Run of show, must-have list, cards |
With a smaller crew, the roaming camera does the interviews in the gaps and the producer handles cards and the list. Write that down as well, so the roaming operator knows the interview slots are theirs.
Look for the moments when two things happen at once. If the award handover overlaps a sponsor’s breakout session, decide in advance which one the photographer covers, and tell the client which one they won’t get.
Audio and cards: the two backups
Stage audio is where event footage most often goes wrong. The desk feed carries whatever the sound engineer sends, so when they ride the levels for the room or play the walk-on music at full volume, your recording gets the same mix.
Ask for a feed that doesn’t follow the faders (a pre-fader send, in sound engineer terms), test it during the sound check with someone speaking into the real stage mic, and record the same feed on a separate recorder. If the camera input clips, the recorder still has the keynote.
Keep the camera’s own mic on a second channel as well, since room sound beats silence when a mic was left muted at the desk.
Cards are the other risk, because there’s no reshoot. One person owns them for the whole day.
- Label each card and log which sessions it holds.
- Offload at every break to two drives before the card goes back into a camera.
- Never format a card that doesn’t exist on both drives.
- Get the morning keynote to the editor at lunch, so the cut starts while the event is still running.
Same-day and next-day deliverables
Agree before the event on what goes out tonight, what goes out tomorrow and what waits for next week. When a client asks for “a video of the event”, it can mean any row of this table.
| Deliverable | When | Approved by |
|---|---|---|
| Highlight reel, 60 to 90 s | Next morning | Head of comms |
| Three vertical cuts | Next day, after the highlight | Head of comms |
| 30 edited photos for press | Same night | Head of comms |
| Full photo gallery | Within a week | Head of comms |
| Each keynote, full length | Within a week | Speaker’s team |
The vertical cuts reuse the highlight’s shots, so they come after it is approved, and reframing for 9:16 has its own traps. The deliverables list post covers how to agree on every file in writing.
Do the upload math before the day. A 90-second highlight exported at 20 megabits per second is about 225 MB. On a 10 Mbps upload that takes three minutes, and on a crowded guest network at 2 Mbps it takes fifteen.
Thirty full-resolution photos add a few hundred megabytes more. If the venue connection is weak, upload from the hotel or the office, and give that its own slot in the day’s schedule.
Keeping review fast when the client wants it tomorrow
A next-morning deadline has room for one round of notes. What slows it down is usually on the client’s side, with four people commenting, each waiting to see what the others said, and nobody sure who decides.
Name one approver before the event and ask everyone else to send notes through that person.
Then agree on a window, something like “the highlight goes out at 10 p.m., notes by 8 a.m., final at 10”. Send it with two lines on what’s settled and what isn’t, for example that the music is licensed and captions come in the next version.
Pick the photos yourself. The client gets the thirty best frames, edited, instead of the 1,200 from the cards. Keep the retouching light for the press set and leave detailed retouch approval for the full gallery later in the week.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview the event day can be a production plan with the date, start time, location and crew. Each video you owe is a task that goes in as a video block, and New Gallery adds the photo delivery to the plan as a block too.
Team Arrival, breaks and Wrap fill in the rest of the day, and the note on each block can carry details like stage access at 7:30 or the sound engineer’s name. The plan’s share link opens without a login, takes an optional password and updates live as blocks are ticked off.
Every deliverable has a due date, which the client sees, and an internal deadline that only your team sees. If the venue Wi-Fi drops during an upload, retrying picks up from the parts already sent.
A new version plays on the review page as soon as its upload finishes. Sending it to the client emails them the link, and they comment on the frame and approve or ask for changes on the same page. The next version goes up on the same task.
Photos go into a photo gallery as JPEG, PNG or WebP files of up to 40 MB each. iPhone HEIC files don’t go through, so export them as JPEG first.
The client comments and draws on each photo but approves or asks for changes on the gallery as a whole, so the press set and the full set work best as two galleries. A retouch goes up as a new version of the same photo, which the client can compare with the previous one.
