Aug 29, 2025
Systems & Clarity
Most shows don’t blow their budget on purpose.
The overruns creep in quietly: an approval sitting unanswered, a re-export triggered by a missed note, a cut stalled for days while teams chase the same answers in three different places. Each moment seems small. Across a season, they add up to weeks of lost time and millions in hidden costs.
The Cost of Invisible Friction
On paper, most post budgets balance. A schedule is mapped, staff are hired, vendors are booked, and everyone expects the delivery to land close to target. But in practice, the gaps show up not in line items, but in the time lost to small breakdowns in communication and process.
What follows are the most common leaks we see when auditing productions.
Approval Delays
An episode gets exported for notes, but the right execs don’t review it until the weekend. The team waits, editors sit idle, and when the feedback finally lands it’s out of sync with the production calendar. Multiply that across picture, mix, and online, and you’ve lost days that can never be recovered.
Approvals don’t just stall schedules. They compound.
Every late approval means:
More idle staff hours.
More last-minute revisions.
More overtime to “catch up.”
Re-exports and Redo Cycles
A missed note in act two can mean a re-export of the entire episode. A mislabeled drive can send a cut to the wrong vendor. These aren’t creative mistakes; they’re workflow misses. Each re-export can burn half a day of AE and finishing time, not to mention re-checks from producers and execs.
The leak here isn’t just the cost of the export. It’s the domino effect:
Mix sessions pushed.
Color rescheduled.
Deliveries slipping further with every redo.
Slack Chases and Buried Requests
The volume of back-channel messages in post is staggering. A producer drops a timecode in Slack. An editor texts a request. A coordinator emails a vendor for transcripts. None of it lives in one place. The result: duplicate requests, missed follow-ups, and work repeated unnecessarily.
When requests aren’t ticketed or tracked, they don’t just slow the team down. They vanish. Every vanished request comes back later as a “fire drill,” costing more staff hours and often forcing vendors into rush fees.
Routine AE Tasks Done Manually
Assistant Editors are trained for creative support. But too often they’re burning overtime on manual file moves, script formatting, or timecard chases. These tasks aren’t glamorous, but when handled inefficiently they eat an enormous share of the budget.
We’ve seen productions lose hundreds of hours to:
Renaming transcripts by hand.
Emailing cuts for approval instead of routing automatically.
Manually checking in drives and footage.
Building schedules from scratch in spreadsheets.
None of these are “mistakes.” They’re just the cost of doing post without a structured system. And they add up fast.
Why These Leaks Hurt More Now
In the past, teams might have absorbed these inefficiencies with extra staff. If approvals stalled, you hired another coordinator. If re-exports piled up, you booked more AE hours. That buffer doesn’t exist anymore.
Budgets are tighter, schedules are shorter, and headcount rarely expands to meet demand. Which means every leak matters. Left unchecked, the “business as usual” way of running post can sink an entire slate.
Post-as-a-Service: Closing the Leaks
This is why SAMEpg built Post-as-a-Service. Instead of asking teams to manage these leaks on top of everything else, we run the operational layer end-to-end. It isn’t another dashboard to configure or a workflow to design. It’s a staffed clarity layer that sits behind the scenes, making sure approvals happen, requests don’t vanish, and deliveries stay on track.
That means:
Approvals are surfaced and closed before they trigger delays.
Requests are ticketed and tracked so nothing slips through the cracks.
Repeat tasks are automated so AEs aren’t burning overtime.
Metrics are monitored so stalls get caught before they turn into overages.
Proof in the Numbers
On real productions, Post-as-a-Service has already:
Cut approval turnaround time in half.
Recovered 38,000+ staff hours.
Kept $3.7M+ on screen.
These aren’t projections, They’re results. Productions that once depended on late nights and extra hires are now delivering the same slates on time, under budget, and without crew burnout.
Protecting More Than Just Budgets
Closing leaks isn’t only about protecting dollars. It protects people. Producers stop spending nights in Slack chases. AEs stop burning weekends on file renames. Executives stop fearing airdate slips. And the creative process regains the breathing room it needs to thrive.
Budgets won’t expand, and timelines won’t ease. Survival depends on running post as a system, not as a series of fire drills. That’s what Post-as-a-Service delivers: clarity over chaos, with the leaks sealed before they sink the season.
