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Determining Editing Rates for a Non-Existent Market
I have scoured the forums looking at all sorts of different rates. When there are members here saying that small projects can be upwards of $500 to $2000 and up for a 30 second commercial, for example, I am floored.
The reason is I am in the northern part of central Texas which puts me about 45 minutes north of Austin right up the highway. The market here for any editing services is quite literally non-existent. Austin and Dallas are flooded out with editors and production companies, but the market here in my county of 315,000 residents is absolutely zero.
I am the only editor in the county. Seriously.
I primarily use Premiere CS6 and After Effects CS6 with some plugins. I’d be able to offer basic editing, some awesome motion graphics, some color correction, the whole bit. (I tend to focus mainly on improving my AE skill.)
This is why I’m wanting to crash into the market here and see what happens, but I am not in what you could call a “video editor friendly” area. This is an area where 90% of people think 50 dollars for a very well done car detailing is highway robbery; also, a car detailing that runs the full course of paint correction and costs 300 dollars would be considered sheer lunacy. It’s not that everyone here is a redneck. It’s more due to the fact that people honestly don’t know how much something like video editing is worth because there’s no market here.
I’m wanting to start a small time side business of general editing and motion graphics. I am a college student working a part-time job at the moment, and I love the whole editing game (and wish to make it my career). I feel confident in my ability to create a professional package for a client. My clientele would probably initially involve soccer moms wanting me to cut footage together of little Johnny kicking a ball around with his dad, or someone wanting me to create a graphics-heavy intro for their gameplay videos or whatever, but I am fine with that in the beginning.
However, I’m afraid that even starting with a base hourly rate of FIFTEEN dollars would scare off essentially everyone. If I were to quote hourly rates more in tune with Austin’s general rates ($40 and up), people would think I’m pipe dreaming and I’m not sure I’d ever get business.
This part is a bit random, but I did find a person in the area recently that did some editing for a couple clients in days gone past. The person has a demo reel on their Youtube channel. The person said they would charge $100-$1000 for 30 second videos, but looking at some of the finished projects the person created, it’s an absolute wonder a client even paid for it. The quality of work the person achieved was on par with a 9 year old kid working with Windows Movie Maker for the first time. Compared to the person, I’d be considered Hollywood-tier, but I’d be deathly afraid of charging that high of a price for a 30 second cut of something that is going to primarily appear on Youtube or websites.
Anyway, the goal of this business in its fledgling state is to do a small, graphical lyric video here, a gameplay intro there, and maybe cut together home videos or anything people have. I unfortunately do not have a proper camera to offer meaningful shooting services (I have a point & shoot with 240/480/1000fps high speed capabilities, though), so I’d be relying on someone just transferring their footage over to my external drive for me to work on it at home. I’m hoping that it could get some momentum through simple marketing and word of mouth.
I might as well try, right? I am a moderately-advanced Premiere and AE user who has a potential market at his fingertips. I’ll never know the real condition of the market until I just jump into it, but I have no idea where to start as far as rates in a market that is possibly afraid of what said rates could be.
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28 Replies
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Hi Patrick –
simple. You can’t make a living where you live. End of story.
I moved from New York, to Florida, where I could only get half of my NY rate – to this day.
IT’s a choice that I made. If I moved to india, I would be making only a fraction of that.
Solution – don’t move to India.If you move to Dallas or Houston, you will be able to earn a very good living for yourself.
I have driven thru Texas many many times. when I pass small towns like Ft. Stockton, and I
see a small hospital, I wonder “why would a doctor that could earn a fortune in Houston want to
practice in a small town like this, where he can barely make any money ?”I don’t know the answer to this. Your answer – move.
Bob Zelin
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I’ll never know the real condition of the market until I just jump into it.
Uhm, yeah you do. LOL Your market doesn’t like paying $30 for a detailing.
It’s really amazing that we live in a time where 20 year olds think they can go into business for themselves, and even more remarkable that they actually DO, and can succeed. 1990, in the days before NLEs were practical, was a different time — but Bob and I were in our 30s before we tried this. And like Bob, I moved to chase opportunities. A couple of times.
So Bob’s got your first solution. Move to a place where you can charge what you need to in order to survive. Austin is one of the most energetic cities in the world, with some of the most exciting opportunities for creative people. Other successful people operating there shouldn’t keep you away. They should tell you that there’s a lot of room for people to succeed.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere — with the bonus that it’s an affordable, livable city relative to nearly any other major market in the country.
The other solution: work for The Man. You could even wind up with benefits. You can DEFINITELY get other people to pay you to get better at what you do. You can maybe even learn some things about actually running a business, even a one-person business like Bob’s, or a 2-person business like the one my wife and I had.
But your subject line lays out the impossibility of making it where you currently. There IS NO MARKET there. No need to sweat what rates you should charge, because you already know that people won’t want to pay it — the definition of no market.
Not that I know anything about where you live besides what you told us..but you really might consider starting to collect boxes. Move away to work for yourself, or move away to work for The Man.
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Tim, I believe we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. It seems to me that you’re indirectly saying that I’m probably just a kid that happened to get his hands on AE the other day and wants to overlay birthday music on a slideshow of a friend of a friend of a friend’s mom’s youngest son’s photos. I’m not sure, but I just wanted t.o address that.
Also, as I said, this would be a side-business of sorts, not something I’m trying to make a living on right now. I’m working a job and focusing on school so I can transfer to UT, hopefully, to pursue the media realm further.
Moving would not be a viable option for me until next year. I was thinking I could at least try the market around here in the meantime because I’d have nothing to lose.
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Well, note that the cost of living is also a lot less than Austin…so you have to adjust for that.
But if there is no market…no one willing to pay for video production services, much less a livable wage…then yeah, there’s no point in being there. If you want to work in video production…move to where it is. If you want to live in that county because you love it there…find something that people there do want, and pursue that.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Note: the reason I’m in this county is because I grew up here and I’m trying to save money to move to Austin to attend UT down there. I can’t just up and move. I also didn’t somehow move to this county to try and capture the market. I’m a 23 year old student with an incredibly limited budget at this time.
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[Patrick Reagan] ” I’m a 23 year old student”
I didn’t mean offense with my post. I said 20s, and indeed, you’re in your 20s. I know it’s different now, but I was in my 30s when I tried this, and in my town, that was considered crazy young to start a business.
I’m just saying that if you can get into something corporate, maybe you could get benefits, maybe matching contributions to an IRA — set yourself up not only for starting your business but for RETIREMENT. Check other threads — that’s really really hard if you start late.
I also read you saying your skills are moderately advanced. I take that for granted in the COW, even if you hadn’t said it.
You asked about rates for a non-existent market (your words). My overly long reply simply suggested that you take your own advice and admit there’s no market. 🙂
[Patrick Reagan] ” I’m afraid that even starting with a base hourly rate of FIFTEEN dollars would scare off essentially everyone.”
That’s a long hard road, Patrick. Can you get by on $10-12/hr without putting yourself into indentured servitude? If the answer is yes, there’s your rate. But take care not to lock yourself into a rate that will leave you unable to move even if you wanted to. Or unable to stay in your town and start a family.
Maybe you can do that on $10-12/hr. But there’s your question. Can you live on the rate you’d need to charge? Not often you get to raise your rates these days, so how long can you charge $10-12/hr before your market pushes you even further down?
I’m also assuming that you can get $10-12/hr. What if it’s less?
Note when I did this in the 90s that my entire county had 80,000 people in it — a quarter the size of yours. I know what it’s like to set up business in a small town that you love, and I get why you want to. I did it…but if I couldn’t have, I wouldn’t have. The market decides these things…and you may not even have one.
You’re right that you won’t know until you try…
…so I’m sorry if I sounded condescending. But I see some flashing yellow lights ahead for you, and a good-sized handful of red ones.
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Thank you for your response. I’m sorry if I jumped the gun on that. There was also a paragraph of your initial post that I somehow missed, but I absorbed it.
I could live on that income because right now, it’s extra income on top of the income I earn at my day job. My day job is what supports me currently (until I go to UT), and editing stuff would simply be a side venture that could possibly earn me some extra scratch in the meantime. When I move to Austin, I will definitely try to take it to the next level as far as how much more I invest in it.
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Patrick, you’ve had thousands of dollars’ worth of expert advice gven you, and you should take it.
However, I’m feeling a little contrarian today, so I’ll kick out some ideas here and maybe one of them would work for you just as a getting your feet wet kind of side project – without leaving the homestead.
While it is true your immediate vicinity has no grasp of your value, the internet doesn’t care where you live. You could branch out to other markets remotely, as long as you have a high bandwidth connection.
Do you play online games like COD or Battlefield or Halo, with others? There’s a booming little niche in taking player’s best game footage and re-cutting it into montages as a vanity/prestige thing. They FTP their screen captures to you and you do the magic, then publish to YouTube or FTP it back.
Texas has sportsmen everywhere: you could advertise editing hunting and fishing footage into polished productions.
Small as your town is, it has to have at least one lawyer serving it. Do they ever need depositions shot and EDITED? Do they ever need advertising spots, even just online ads?
If there is a hospital or a jail or a school nearby, all these institutions have a constant need for training materials. Go see their HR people and ask who makes their training media.
How about handling the overflow, editing for a wedding video/events video producer/ a few towns over? By FTP/ Cloud, or overnight shipping duplicate hard drives back and forth, you could help an already established operator keep up with all his editing work, while you build skills.
Visit the local historical society and chamber of commerce. Ask them about a video detailing the history of the town, or outlining it’s attractions and amenities online.
All these are jobs you could do at home in your underwear. But first you have to put on your big boy pants and knock on some local doors. Be a Producer and hire yourself.
If none of these plans work out after giving it a good hard try, I’d reconsider moving to Austin or anywhere big, because it is not enough to be talented in a big city. You’ll just get underpaid scutwork unless you know how to market yourself and make the “ask” convincingly for the rate you want. Upselling the locals is not a drag, son; it is TRAINING for bigger and better things. This is you AA league time, building skills for The Big Show. Go out and sell, sell, sell!
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Two shoe salesmen go to a third world country and find a huge population of bare footed people. One salesman says, “no, this will never work, no one wears shoes here.” The other salesman looks at the same sight and says, “wow, look at the potential here.” Which salesman are you?
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Work to your strengths. Offer editing and post services for production companies in Texas that would happily pay €20 per hour for a freelancer to edit. Do brilliant work and go further than anyone else with your time. Work remotely and build a list of production companies around Texas that you will be able to work for whilst at Uni. Gain experience working on projects for clients who value your work.
However, if you think there is a market for you then test the water. It wont cost you anything bit time to offer services for whatever price you think fits….
How would you feel though if you made a video for a kids sports team, spent 2 days working on it, sent an invoice for $50 and then were asked to do hours of changes and modifications for free? Do you see working for people who don’t value your work as good experience?
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