We love to work pro-bono for projects involving charitable institutions, especially those working for social justice, living history projects, or education; in such cases our fees may be waived entirely. We are able to do this because we do not derive our primary income from this endeavor and indeed formed our organization in order to fulfill a desire to volunteer in our community.

Nevertheless, even if a project is being done pro-bono, it is important for the beneficiary to understand what the market value of such work is.

Without knowing the specifics of a project, it is difficult to estimate the cost of a completed program. Nevertheless, some generalities follow below.

Our pricing philosophy is as follows: For commercial projects, our rates are $50-200 per hour, depending on complexity. Consumables, outside equipment rentals, and outsourced items such as additional tape stock, grip / lighting, stock footage / images / sound effects / music, and mass duplication and fulfillment are assessed at cost. A reasonable amount of initial consultation is always free.

Rates are typically charged by the day for production (that is, principal photography), by the hour for post-production (that is, editing, creating titles, finding music, showing intermediate results, making changes based on client feedback), and at cost plus maybe a minor fee for subcontracted fulfillment services (that is, design of custom packaging, mass duplication, and mailing).

As a very rough guideline, a production of low complexity, such as a simple training tape or DVD title without serious menus, will be about $1500-3500 per finished minute. This is for a very simple production; the section below attempts to break down where all that money and time is spent. In every production, almost all steps mentioned below, plus many additonal ones, are performed to some extent; what makes for better-looking productions is an increased level of elaboration and division of labor at each step.


There are several discrete steps in the production process.

Pre-production time is free but is crucially important in order to understand the client's expectations and budget, determine the scope of the project, gather location permissions, do location scouts, find out how much writing must be done (from a simple outline to script to a full storyboard), and much more.

Production time and money is as we described above: $50-200 per hour using our equipment and staff of one or two, depending on complexity. Better equipment can be rented for more money. A professional lighting director with lighting and grip gear, worth their weight in gold, can cost about $1500 per day. There are some minor consumable costs such as $25 per 66-minute DVCPRO tape and blank VHS or DVD media so that the client might view raw footage.

Professional talent during production can be useful if the production is less of a documentary or industrial and more of a commerical nature or if it must involve children. A typical talent agency fee might be $500 for someone for a day.

Professional voice-over adds an authoritative touch; however, this is an area in which the freshness and honesty of subjects or clients can sometimes be equally effective. Costs involved for a simple few dozen lines of script is in the low hundreds to low thousands to sky-is-the-limit, depending on the star quality and recognizability of the voice talent.

Post-production (editing) time and money is as we described above: $50-200 per hour using our equipment.

Graphics needed during post-production may range from simple titles, which are relatively easy to create, to elaborate motion graphics, which can be extremely complex, time-consuming, and costly. We can do simple titles and 2D motion graphics, but this field is really a specialty in its own right. A series of simple lower-third titles take a few man-hours to create, but it is not uncommon to spend many man-weeks on motion graphics.

Music needed during post-production must be copyright-cleared. Obscure old radio songs can be nonexclusively licensed for a suprisingly reasonable cost ($100-300) with the major record labels. However, hit songs, past or present, will cost astronomical amounts of money. There are many production libraries on the market which charge a one-time fee that seems to hover around the $50-350 range (okay quality) or a yearly fee in the same range (very good quality, and it is not the hassle you might think that would be). Custom-produced original music is always better, lest you hear "your" music on a radio commercial, and of course it costs more. Knowing musicians of the genre appropriate to the production can be a great money saver.

Fulfillment is the process of mass duplication when the production is done and the master is thus finished. If you require this service, we will contract it out, at cost, to one of many companies which do this. Custom package design, DVD silkscreening and tape labels are possible, as are mailing services. Recently-seen (November 2003) prices for non-glass (non-pressed) DVDs for "short" runs of 1000 were around $2000.


Quick, slick, or cheap: Choose any two.

The amount of work and money required depends on what production values are expected, how action-packed the edited result must be, how sophisticated the graphics must be, how organized the pre-production planning is, the skill of the videographer and editor, how many locations or set-ups there are, and much more. The effort that the desired result demands can then be satisfied by spending either extra cost or extra time, according to the well-known maxim that it can be quick, slick, or cheap -- pick any two.


Some examples to consider.

An 11-minute program for an aerobics instructor required 25 man-hours (it was a 1-person shoot; a 2-person shoot (50 man-hours) would have been much easier in this case) of photography time (yielding 4 hours of footage) during three different sessions and more that 400 man-hours of editing time; this particular project was unscripted and the "story" was put together in editing, using the interviews with the instructor as both on-camera and voice-over narration to tie it all together. The 4 hours of raw footage was just enough material for the 11 finished minutes. The final result was highly successful, but the number of hours required for this project is a great example of how much effort it takes and further illustrates that a bit more up-front planning (a script) might have reduced post-production time somewhat (or not).

Linear, "nonstop" events such as weddings, with their reduced complexity, require much less setup and production time, perhaps 4-10 hours (also yielding about 4 hours of footage) and, if the client prefers to keep it simple, much less editing time, perhaps 40 man-hours, yet if the client wants it fancy and complex, 100 man-hours or more is not uncommon.

A 1-hour industrial technical presentation was extremely simple to shoot and post-produce; it merely consisted of a few talking heads and PowerPoint slides. We acquired the slides and edited them into the program. Time spent was 3 man-hours during the shoot and fewer than 40 man-hours in post (would have been less if the slides did not need cleaning up).