Music video pre-production software

Most pre-production software is sized for narrative: a long script, several weeks of shooting, a production office that keeps the documents current. A music video inverts nearly every one of those parameters without removing a single document from the list. You still need a breakdown, a schedule, call times and a budget — you just need them in two weeks, out of a text that runs three pages, for a day where six locations follow one another. The table below sets out the differences that actually matter when you are choosing a tool.

This is the first question we get about the format: a music video has no screenplay, so what is there to break down? The treatment, the storyboard, the shot list — any document describing what will be shot. Soldum imports it as a PDF and pulls out everything that carries a cost or a constraint: setups, locations, interior or exterior, day or night, whether the artist is in frame, dancers and background, wardrobe and looks, props, vehicles, grip, specific technical needs. A treatment says less than a script, and the breakdown makes that visible: the gaps show up in a list instead of surfacing the night before the shoot. Nothing the AI proposes is applied without your approval — you review it setup by setup, fix what was misread, and add what the text does not say yet.

On narrative, the running order follows locations. On a music video, it follows looks: every change of wardrobe, hair and makeup takes the artist out for thirty to ninety minutes, and that, not travel, is what eats the day. On top of it sit the constraints specific to the format. Playback is shot to the track, so in full passes rather than fragments. Choreography needs rehearsal on the floor before the first take. Dancers and background have call times that are not the crew's. Soldum treats all of this as breakdown data: a look, a group of background performers or a choreographed section attaches to the setups it concerns, and the schedule groups them instead of leaving you to count wardrobe round trips in your head.

A music video is costed backwards: the amount comes first, awarded by the label or the commissioner, and the question is not what the video costs but what fits. Soldum builds the budget from the breakdown and the schedule — categories and line items, quantities, labour separated from rentals and services, employer contributions computed rather than guessed — so you can put a real cost next to the award before committing to anything. Rates can be grounded in French collective-agreement scales, the industry-wide minimum pay grids used on French productions, which is a concrete advantage if you shoot in France and simply neutral if you do not. When you are fifteen per cent over, what matters is the trade-off, and a trade-off is easier on a built budget than on a hunch: one location fewer, one day of grip fewer, two dancers fewer.

On a single-day shoot, the schedule does not need to be optimal, it needs to be survivable. Soldum builds it from the breakdown: setups grouped by location and by look, travel time between places, choreography rehearsals placed ahead of takes, and the window in which the artist is genuinely available — almost always the real limiting factor, ahead of daylight. When a location falls through five days out, or the artist pushes their arrival by three hours, you do not redraw the day: you change the element and the rest recalculates, along with the call sheets and the budget lines that depend on it. It is the most common event on a music video, and the most expensive one to handle by hand.

The crew on a music video does not exist before the music video: it comes together in about ten days, everyone arrives on a different call, and plenty of them have never worked together. That is exactly the situation where a vague call sheet costs an hour on the floor. Soldum generates it from the schedule: running order, individual call times — the artist does not arrive when grip arrives — locations and addresses, key contacts, weather, and the parking and catering details that account for half the texts you get the night before. It goes out as a link rather than an attachment, which settles the most expensive question of a one-day shoot: who has the current version. When a time moves, the sheet is regenerated and the link stays the same.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your treatment and offers no editor: writing is imported. We do not handle editing, colour or visual effects, which weigh heavily on a music video's calendar. We handle no rights questions at all: master and publishing clearances, performer releases and filming permits are yours and your counsel's. We do not negotiate with vendors — the numbers you obtain stay yours to enter — and we do not build moodboards or visual research. And on a performance video shot in an afternoon by three people against a cyclorama, formal prep has close to nothing to automate: the value is limited to the budget, if you submit one.

The lowest-risk test is a real project rather than a sample: import the treatment for your next video and compare the breakdown you get with the list you would have written by hand. The 7-day free trial is enough to decide before the first charge. On plans, billing is per account rather than per seat: €49 excl. VAT per month on Solo for one project at a time, €179 excl. VAT per month on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole crew invited at no extra cost per member, and 25% off on annual billing. On a format where you run several videos a month with a different crew each time, per-account billing is what changes the arithmetic.