Highlight reels are easy to make look good. Ninety seconds of nice shots set to music tells you very little about whether a crew can hold up across three days, four rooms, and a schedule that slips by forty minutes before lunch.
These are the questions worth asking.
1. Have You Shot Conferences Specifically?
Not events. Not weddings. Conferences. They are a different discipline: fixed schedules, stage lighting you cannot change, speakers you cannot direct, and no possibility of a second take. Ask to see a full piece from a multi-day programme, not a montage.
2. How Many Rooms Can You Cover at Once?
If your programme has concurrent breakouts, this is the question that matters most. One crew cannot cover four rooms running simultaneously. Either you are getting four crews or you are getting a selection — and it is far better to decide which sessions matter in advance than to discover the gap afterwards.
3. How Are You Taking Audio?
The correct answer involves the house sound board. A clean feed from the mixer captures what the room's microphones capture. A camera microphone at the back of a ballroom captures the air conditioning and the person unwrapping a sweet in row four. Audio is the single most common reason conference footage turns out unusable, and it is entirely preventable.
4. Can You Handle IMAG, or Is That the AV Company?
If the room is big enough to need the speaker's face on screens, someone has to send a live camera feed to those screens. Sometimes it is your AV vendor, sometimes the video crew, and occasionally both assume it is the other. Establish this early — it changes the camera plan and who is standing where.
5. Can You Deliver a Same-Day Edit?
A short film cut from the morning's footage and played back before the programme closes is one of the few genuinely memorable things you can do with video at an event. It also requires an editor sitting on site all day and a workflow built for it. Ask whether they have actually done it, not whether they could.
6. What Am I Getting, and in What Formats?
Be specific. A highlight film for next year's promotion is a different deliverable from a full session recording for people who could not attend, which is different again from vertical cuts for social. Agree the list and the aspect ratios before the shoot, because it changes how things are filmed.
7. Who Is Actually Turning Up?
At larger companies the person you meet is not always the person on the floor. Ask who is operating, who is producing, and whether they have worked together before. Crews who know each other move faster and get in the way less.
8. What Happens When the Schedule Slips?
It will. The keynote runs long, the panel starts late, someone moves the photo call. What you want to hear is a plan — priorities agreed in advance so that when something has to give, it is not the thing you cared about most.
The Short Version
Ask about audio, concurrent rooms, and deliverables. Those three answers will tell you more than any showreel.
If you have an event coming up in Los Angeles, we are happy to answer all eight of these on a call — including honestly telling you when we are not the right crew for it.