Help Us Help You: Why Getting Your Video Brand Assets Together is the Secret Sauce to a Streamlined Production

Do you have all of your brand assets handy? If you’ve finally signed off on the budget for your brand new video content strategy, then it’s an exciting time for you and your organisation! Whether it’s a slick promotional film, a punchy social media ad, or an internal training piece, video is one of the most powerful tools in your video marketing arsenal.

But before we pick up a camera or start slicing up footage in the edit suite, we need to have a little chat about your video brand assets.

We get it. You’re busy. You’re juggling a dozen campaigns, managing a team, and trying to keep the sales department happy. Digging through the server to find a font file or trawling your emails looking for the contact email for that graphic designer you used for a specific logo vector files feels like a chore you could do without.

However, handing over a comprehensive set of brand assets at the start of the project is the difference between a video and a video that looks like your video.

Why Brand Asset Consistency is King

For most organisations, brand consistency isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s your currency. It’s how you build trust. When a potential customer lands on your website, picks up a brochure, and then watches your video, the visual language needs to be fluent across all three.

If your website uses a crisp, modern sans-serif font, but your video uses a generic default font because we didn’t have the file, the viewer subconsciously registers a disconnect. It feels less professional. It feels “off.”

When we ask for your video brand assets, we aren’t just being pedantic about file types. We are trying to ensure that the content we create acts as a seamless extension of your brand identity at the highest quality possible. We want your target audience to know, within the first three seconds, that this content belongs to you.

So, what exactly do we need? Let’s break it down into the essentials.

1. Your Brand Asset Guidelines: The Holy Grail

If your organisation has a Brand Guidelines document (sometimes called a Brand Book or Style Guide), please—we beg of you—send this first and quickly.

Think of this document as the blueprint for your house. It tells us the rules. It outlines exactly how your logo and other brand assets should be used (and how they shouldn’t), the hierarchy of your typefaces, the mood of your imagery, and your primary and secondary colour palettes.

This is the single most helpful thing you can provide. It allows our editors and motion graphics artists to get inside the head of your brand assets. Instead of guessing whether you’re a “fun and quirky” brand or a “serious and corporate” brand, we can look at the guidelines you or your marketing team have already agonised over.

If you don’t have a formal document, don’t panic! We can still work our magic, but we will need you to be specific about the following three elements.

2. Text and Font Brand Assets

Typography is a massive part of your brand’s voice. A tech startup uses very different fonts from a heritage bakery.

When we add titles, lower-thirds (the name tags that pop up when someone is speaking), or kinetic typography to your video, we need to match your print and web presence.

The Common vs. The Custom

• Standard Fonts: If your brand uses Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman, just let us know. These are standard on almost every computer, and we can match them instantly.

• Custom Fonts: If you use a specific font that you’ve purchased or had designed (like ‘Circular Std‘ or ‘Brandon Grotesque‘), we can’t just guess it. We need the actual font file.

Technically speaking, we are looking for .TTF (TrueType Font) or .OTF (OpenType Font) files. Without these, our we will have replace your lovely custom font with one that “smells wrong”, and frankly, nobody wants their premium brand video to default to Courier New.

Top Tip: If you can’t find the file on your server, send a quick email to the graphic designer who built your website or designed your brochure. They will have these brand asset files sat on a hard drive and can usually WeTransfer them over in minutes.

3. Colours

“Can you make the background blue?”

This is a phrase that keeps video editors up at night. You see, “blue” is subjective. Is it Sky Blue? Navy? Teal? Royal Blue?

When it comes to branding, close enough isn’t good enough. We want to make sure that any graphics, animations, or background elements we design are the exact shade of your brand.

To do this, we need your brands Hex Codes.

A Hex code is a six-digit code (usually starting with a hashtag, like #FF5733) that tells a computer exactly which mix of Red, Green, and Blue to display. It removes all ambiguity.

• Why it matters: If your logo is a specific shade of burnt orange, and we use a generic bright orange for the text background, it will clash. It looks cheap. By providing the Hex codes (which are usually found in that Brand Guidelines document we mentioned earlier), you ensure that your video looks polished and premium.

   

4. Logos and Graphic Brand Assets: Resolution is Everything

This is the big one. The most common delay in post-production comes from being sent low-quality logo files by our clients.

We often receive a tiny JPEG logo that someone has right-clicked and saved from the email footer. On a mobile phone screen, that might look okay. But when we stretch that image to fit a 4K video monitor or a large conference screen, it turns into a pixelated, blurry mess.

Furthermore, we need to talk about transparency. If you send us a standard JPEG, it has a white box behind it. If we try to place that over video footage, you see the white box. It looks like a sticker. To make it look professional, we need the logo to have a transparent background (technically known as an alpha channel).

The File Hierarchy (In Order of Preference)

To keep your video brand assets pristine, here is what we need, ranked from “Perfect” to “We can make it work.”

1. Adobe Illustrator (.ai) or Encapsulated PostScript (.eps):

These are Vector files. They are the gold standard. Vectors are made of math, not pixels. This means we can blow your logo up to the size of a billboard, and it will remain perfectly crisp.

2. Adobe Photoshop (.psd):

These are usually high-quality raster files. As long as the resolution is high, these are fantastic brand assets for us to work with, especially if they have layers we can animate.

3. Portable Network Graphic (.png):

If you don’t have the professional design files above, a PNG is your next best friend. PNGs support transparency (no white box!) and are usually better quality than JPEGs. But they don’t automatically have transparency, so keep an eye out for that!

4. JPEG (.jpg):

The last resort. JPEGs do not support transparency, so they will always have a background. They also lose quality every time they are saved. If it’s large enough in terms of pixels and data, we might get away with it as long as we match the background colour.

“But I don’t have an .AI file!”

If you are looking at this list and thinking, “I have no idea what an Illustrator file is,” don’t worry—you are not alone. Most business owners only ever deal with JPEGs.

However, the person who designed your logo definitely has the AI file.

Get the ball rolling now: Drop an email to the freelancer or agency that designed your logo and other brand assets originally. Even if it was three years ago, they should still have the master files on record. Do this today, rather than waiting until we are in the edit suite. Designers can sometimes take a few days to dig into their archives, and you don’t want to be holding up your video launch waiting for a file attachment.

5. Motion Graphics:

If you’ve had video content produced before, you may have had your logo animated, some custom lower thirds or other graphics. Unless we are working on a full re-brand together, you will need to keep your brand consistent by using these same assets.

Generally, the same rules apply to images as they do video in terms of resolution, transparency and using the “master” files if we can. These will generally be files such as .ae (Adobe After Effects) or possibly a .moti (Apple Motion). Be warned though, unlike image master files, you will need to ensure that any elements that were used in the creation of your motion graphics are also available and “online” for us to be able to open everything.

It is great that you want to leverage video brand assets you’ve commissioned in the past. Maybe you had a shoot three years ago with a different production company, and the shots of your office or factory are still relevant. We are 100% on board with this—it saves you money and carbon on shooting days and maximizes your assets.

However, there is a right way and a wrong way to supply this.

The “Rushes” vs. The Finished Edit

Ideally, we need the “Rushes.” This is the industry term for the raw, original footage that came straight out of the camera. It hasn’t been graded, it hasn’t been cut, and most importantly, it is clean.

If you can’t get the rushes, we can work with exported files, but there are caveats:

• Quality: The file needs to be high resolution (HD or 4K) and originally produced to a high standard. We can’t polish a low-quality file.

• The “Burnt-in” Problem: This is the dealbreaker. We cannot use old video footage if it has brand assets such as graphics, subtitles, or logos “burnt in.” Imagine trying to take the butter off a piece of toast—it’s impossible. If your old video has a lower-third name tag over the CEO’s face, and you want to use that shot in a new video, we can’t remove that text.

Recutting Existing Edits

If a video project you created previously with a supplier is a good enough standard but it just needs a few tweeks, we’re fully open to working with previous edits. You will need to speak to your previous video supplier about getting hold of the edit program project file such as .prproj (Adobe Premiere Pro) or .drp (Davinci Resolve) and all of the assets and LUTS that attached to it. Your previous supplier should know what to do.

Start the Conversation Early

If you know you want to use old footage, contact your previous videographer or production company immediately.

Production companies archive huge amounts of data. Retrieving your specific project from “cold storage” (deep archives) takes time. They might charge a small administrative fee for the retrieval and transfer of the RAW data, but it is worth every penny for the quality difference and a great addition to your brand assets.

Please don’t leave this until the week of the edit. It can sometimes take a week or more for a previous supplier to locate, upload, and send over hundreds of gigabytes of raw footage. If you get in touch with them now, the files will be ready and waiting when we need them.

Summary: The Brand Asset Checklist

We want your video to be brilliant. We want it to drive sales, increase engagement, and make your competitors jealous. By taking twenty minutes to gather the right files—and chasing up your old designers—before the edit begins, you save hours of back-and-forth emails and revision costs later down the line.

So, before we hit record, let’s do a quick stocktake of your video brand assets:

• Brand Guidelines: (PDF) – The rulebook.

• Fonts: (TTF or OTF) – If you use custom typography.

• Colours: (Hex Codes) – So we get the shade exactly right.

• Logos: (.AI, .PSD, or high-res .PNG) – Chase your designer for the vectors!

• Old Footage: (Original Rushes) – Email your old videographer today.

Even if you are just reading this and don’t have any video production projects currently booked with us, this will actually be a really good thing for your organisation. You now know what to do to get the ball rolling with obtaining the best versions of all your assets in once place, rather than scattered amongst various stakeholders.

Getting these assets together shows us you’re serious about your brand, and it frees us up to do what we do best; making you look amazing on screen.