Should be easy to estimate, no? Well it depends. Depending where you are located and the editor’s amount of experience, editing rates per hour will vary from $100-$175 per hour.
You can ballpark expectations by creating a ratio based on how much material do you have to work with?
Everything that’s edited will go through the same workflow:
- Importing media
- Identify selects by logging
- First cut and number of revisions required
- Colour correction and enhancements
- Sound Mix
- Final release and delivery of various file formats.
Depending on your story-line, editing ratios can range from 5:1 to 20:1. Ratios will grow or shrink depending on the complexity. Longer sequences take less time than something with many cuts. Dramatic pieces with many different angles will also require more editing time. For an average, we’ll say 10:1 editing to shooting. So, an hour of shooting requires 10 hours of editing. That’ll change if you used more than one camera simultaneously, created cutaway shots, if you are cutting to a musical beat or need more time colouring and effecting your project to create a “look”.
Another way to budget would be to count how many cuts per minute your finished video will have and multiply that by the finished video length. If it takes 5 minutes per cut and you have 12 cuts per minute, it will take under an hour to edit a minute of video. Remember again, some projects are not as complex as others. Complexities in sound design, transitions, graphics and colour correction all require an amount of finesse. How many revisions will you require to create a complex montage sequence?
Best guess is that you apply both formulas to create a window for a price. That way, depending on who you’ll invite to give you a quotation, you’ll be better prepared to understand the process and set parameters.
Hill’s Video Productions is a full service facility: we shoot and we edit. Everything is available under one roof. We package price, offer breaks for volume and have a wealth of experience to draw upon.