• Business & Career Building

  Charging for Video Compression

  Posted by Matt Warren on June 16, 2006 at 1:30 pm

  What is the “standard” billing rate for video encoding? Prior to using VP6, most of my encoding utilized Soresnon Spark pro or Windows Media. With these codecs, compression was fairly fast and I billed at $75 per hour of compression time. With VP6, my compression times have dramatically increased – a recent 20min export took 13.5 hours to compress using VP6 on Sorenson Flash 4.3. With such increased encoding times, I’ve been charging a flat rate of $75 per clip. I know other folks that bill for encoding by finished minutes of video. I look forward to your feedback.

  Rich Rubasch replied 19 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

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  Mike Cohen

  June 16, 2006 at 5:22 pm

  time spent encoding is time NOT spent editing, which makes you more money – so you have to find a way to be compensated for not being able to do anything else while the video encodes. If you have already set a precedent of $75/clip, good luck going back to hourly rates with that client.
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  Rich Rubasch

  June 16, 2006 at 11:18 pm

  I usually have a second machine doing the encoding, but I charge $80 per hour to set up the encode, which may include a few short passes as tests. Then I charge about $50 for the other computer to churn out the encode.

  So you are not too far off.

  Rich Rubasch
  Tilt Media

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