Corporate vs. Entertainment – What You Need To Know

Video Localization for entertainment has been around for over 50 years and began with motion pictures that needed to be distributed globally. It’s a complicated and expensive process because if you lose the meaning in localization, the program loses its entertainment value. Entertainment, by nature, is supposed to be challenging to follow so you pay attention. If you figure out the ending in the middle of the movie, it’s disappointing.

Entertainment also has various techniques to keep you guessing, like foreshadowing, unpredictability and creating dilemmas. To make things even more complex, there is nuance, innuendo, slang, and idiomatic expressions. Localization for entertainment is a painstakingly slow process that sometimes goes frame by frame. If you make one mistake, you can confuse an entire region, so there are numerous steps of quality control.

The majority of service providers focus primarily on entertainment localization because that is historically where the business comes from. Now we are seeing the emergence of entirely new markets of corporate and educational video that want to reach global audiences. When we tell them there are nine layers of quality control and give them the quote, their jaws drop. This sticker shock is turning great companies away from our industry because they are never going to pay entertainment rates.

Corporate and educational videos are entirely different. It’s primarily straight forward and designed to be easy to understand, even for complicated subjects. These videos are much shorter than entertainment videos, and frequently need to be batched together. You cannot apply entertainment style minimums to these markets, it just doesn’t work.

There is also less dialogue between people and even fewer talking heads. There are more graphics and long shots of products and services. Corporate and educational video is mostly about voice overs.

At SourceLocal.Net we understand the difference between the two. We are not going to scoff at your corporate video and tell you how we work with entertainment giants and Hollywood stars. There is too much of that in this business already. What we will do is give you an honest assessment of what needs to be done and the best way to approach it. You will get a fair price that will work within your budget, the first time.

So please don’t be put off by the video localization industry because you received a quote that made your head spin. There is a reasonable approach for every project, and we will help you find yours.