OT: Music Video Editing Rates?

S

Shaz

New member
Sorry about the off topic post everyone. I was wondering if you know what would be a good per hour rate for editing a music video?

I am looking into setting up a Mac G5 based video editing system in one of the rooms in my studio and need to work out a business plan.

Thanks!
 
Shaz said:
Sorry about the off topic post everyone. I was wondering if you know what would be a good per hour rate for editing a music video?

I am looking into setting up a Mac G5 based video editing system in one of the rooms in my studio and need to work out a business plan.

Thanks!
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depends on what software/hardware you plan on using and the skill of the engineer who will be using it.
 
If you're hiring an engineer, then I would think that a plan of attack might be to first figure how much this guy is costing you. Is he billing you by the hour for his services or are you paying a salary?

Either way, you probably should come up with an hourly figure for how much this guy is going to cost you. If he's billing you hourly, then you'll already know his hourly cost. Then come up with a reasonable target figure for the number of billable hours you'll be able to generate per month; i.e.how much business you plan on doing. If you paying him a salary, take his monthly pay and divide it by the number of hours you be billing for, and that will tell you how much per hour this guy is costing you.

Then figure out how much everything else is going to cost you per month (rent, equipment loans, insurance, advertising, expendables, other employees, etc.) Divide that by the number of billable hours you plan for. Take that answer and add it to the engineer's cost per hour and you'll have a rough cost per hour for you to do business.

Add what you feel is a fair percentage for you to make for yourself and you'll have a rough idea of what your hourly rate needs to be. If it's too high compared to the competition, then you'll need to either find a way to increase your billables or decrease your costs. If it's too low compared to the competition, then either your estimate of billable hours is unrealistic for your market, or you have managed to keep the costs low enough to have a winning business formula.

(And to get you off to a good start, I won't bill you for this consultancy :D)

G.
 
Thanks for your help! Well, the deal I am doing with the engineer is to actually pay me per hour cost for using my equipment. He doesn't have a place to built an editing area, so my cost is the initial investment + the monthly expenses (electric, maintanence etc ...) I was thinking about ~$100 per hour, is that too high? I am not sure what the engineer will be charging his clients.

I guess my question is, how much do these video editing studio charge hourly?
 
Shaz said:
I guess my question is, how much do these video editing studio charge hourly?
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That totally depends on equipment, skill, location and competition. In my travels in the video and movie editing world about 6 years ago, I had client studios ranging anywhere from prosumer project studios at $45/hr to Big Boy production houses that could go up to several hundred an hour for video mastering studio time. Plus the rates varied on locations. My client studio in South Africa had a totally different rate structure for their custys than one of our dealer studios in L.A. did.

I'd say that $100/hr was just on the low side of average. But what you probably want to do is find your rivals in the phone book or local entertainment guide; ones that offer similar services and quality to yours and would possibly be direct competition for you are the ones you shoud look at. Find out how they have their fees structured; if they seem to be happy and successful with those fees, that might be a good place for you to start.

G.
 
Shaz said:
Thanks for your help! Well, the deal I am doing with the engineer is to actually pay me per hour cost for using my equipment. He doesn't have a place to built an editing area, so my cost is the initial investment + the monthly expenses (electric, maintanence etc ...) I was thinking about ~$100 per hour, is that too high? I am not sure what the engineer will be charging his clients.

I guess my question is, how much do these video editing studio charge hourly?
Click to expand...

i will tell you that the studio i work for charges a lot more than that. at least the Avid rooms do (which is going to be more pricier than the Final Cut systems)...but i'm not sure about the cost of our Final Cut pro room.

so I'd say 100 may be a good place to start off at.
 
It's pricey but take a look at media 100 great system i worked with it for about 2 years and loved it .
 
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