What a workflow review costs and what moves the price

What the review actually covers

Workflow consulting at entertavi is a review of how a show or a studio day moves from the first signal to the finished file. We look at signal flow between cameras, vision mixer, audio desk and recorders, at how files are named, copied and archived, and at the show-day procedures your crew follows when something goes wrong. The aim is fewer delays, not a new set of tools for their own sake.

I have sat through enough rehearsals to know that most hold-ups are small and repeated: a clip saved to the wrong drive, a cue list that exists in two versions, a monitor feed nobody checked before going live. A review puts names and times to those moments so they can be fixed in order of how much time they cost.

The price covers the time we spend on site, the time spent writing up what we found, and one follow-up conversation with your team to go through the notes. It does not include buying or installing equipment, which would be quoted separately.

• Signal flow from camera to output
• File handling, naming and storage
• Show-day running order and fallback steps
• A written report and one follow-up call

How we price the time

We price a review by the day. A day of consulting with one of our engineers is charged at £480, and a short single-room review of a small streaming studio is often done in one day with the write-up included. Larger sites, such as a multi-gallery broadcast facility, take longer and are quoted from an agreed number of days.

The figure is for the engineer's time at your premises and the preparation and reporting around it. Travel within Somerset is included in the day rate. Travel further afield, and any overnight stay needed for an early or late show, is added at cost and shown as its own line in the quotation.

We would rather give you a clear number of days than an open-ended hourly figure, because it lets your finance team plan and lets us say plainly when the work is finished.

What makes a review longer

The main thing that moves the price is how much there is to look at. A studio with one control room, a handful of cameras and a single recording path is quick to map. A site with several rooms, remote contributors, a mix of old and new equipment and more than one team using the same files takes more days, simply because there are more routes to trace and more people to talk to.

Documentation matters too. If a current signal diagram and a written running order already exist, we can start from them. If they live only in the heads of two long-serving technicians, part of the first day goes on drawing them out, which is useful work but takes time.

Access is the third factor. We can only watch a real show-day if one is happening within the review period, so we sometimes need to shape the days around your production calendar.

• Number of rooms, cameras and recording paths
• State of existing diagrams and procedures
• Number of staff we need to speak to
• Whether a live show falls within the review

What is not in the price

A review report recommends changes; it does not carry them out. If we suggest a different cabling route, a new storage layout or a change to remote control panels, the installation or configuration is a separate piece of work and is quoted on its own terms, drawing on our camera control or studio design services where relevant.

Training sessions for your staff on the new procedures are also separate. Some teams are happy to take the written notes and run with them, others want an engineer to walk the crew through a rehearsal. Both are reasonable, and we would rather price what you actually want than bundle in extras.

Rush work is the last item. If a review has to be done within a few days of your enquiry, we will say whether we can fit it in, and any weekend or late-evening attendance is noted in the quotation.

How ordering and payment work

Nothing is bought on this website. You send an enquiry through the contact page, describing the studio or event, how many people use it and what is going wrong. One of us replies, often with a few questions, and then sends a written quotation that sets out the number of days, the day rate, any travel and the date we propose to start.

Once you confirm the quotation in writing, we book the days. After the work is finished and the report is delivered, we issue an invoice, which is paid by bank transfer to the account shown on it. Payment terms are written on the invoice itself.

If plans change, cancellations and refunds follow the payment and refund policy published on this site, so you can read the terms before you decide to go ahead.

Getting a useful quotation

You can speed up the quotation by telling us a few things in your first message: how many rooms or stages are involved, roughly how many cameras and audio sources you run, where files are stored, and what an ordinary show day looks like. A rough sketch or an old signal diagram is welcome, even if it is out of date.

It also helps to tell us honestly what the pain point is. Missed handovers between shifts, slow file transfers after recording, or confusion over who owns which cue are all problems we have seen, and each points to a slightly different shape of review.

From that we can usually say whether one day, two days or a longer engagement is realistic, and we will tell you if we think a review is not what you need yet.

A workflow review is priced on days of engineer time, with the number of days set by the size of your site, the state of your documentation and how much we need to observe. Travel, installation and training are shown separately, and the quotation tells you the total before you agree to anything. If you are unsure which category you fall into, describe your studio on the contact page and we will give you an honest estimate.