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Do FCPX freelance editors charge for your “Edit Suite”
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Oliver, either they are supplying/renting their own gear from someplace, in which case they already have that cost figured out, and they’re only hiring someone to work it, or they are expecting the editor to also supply, in effect RENT THEM, the gear needed, add that to the editing charge and and bill one daily fee. How is a rental charge any different in the long run from depreciating your own gear costs?
You’re telling me a 100-to-300 dollar difference in the day rate between an editor with gear/no gear is going to be make or break for getting the gig, and I would respond that that amount of difference is barely the budget for a craft services table for one day, and this production therefore is probably not fully funded enough to make it to the martini shot, so I’m better off looking for another gig… is how I see it.
If you only ever take the rate they demand, how do you ever get more than they want to give? Than what you’re really worth? It’s a race to the bottom, and that’s unsustainable.
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[Mark Suszko] “or they are expecting the editor to also supply, in effect RENT THEM, the gear needed, add that to the editing charge and and bill one daily fee. “
That means, you still need to negotiate with 2 prices in mind – labor only or labor + gear. Whether that’s a single day rate or not doesn’t really matter.
[Mark Suszko] “You’re telling me a 100-to-300 dollar difference in the day rate between an editor with gear/no gear is going to be make or break for getting the gig”
Yes, it absolutely is and I’ve run into this repeatedly with many clients.
[Mark Suszko] “and I would respond that that amount of difference is barely the budget for a craft services table for one day”
Now you are applying the logic that few clients ever do. It’s about line items, not totals, for many.
[Mark Suszko] “and this production therefore is probably not fully funded enough to make it to the martini shot, so I’m better off looking for another gig… is how I see it”
I’m afraid that few folks have that luxury any more.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Soyka] “What’s included in “edit facilities” for $120/hr”
Here we are running Adobe, FCP, and Avid machines, attached to a large SAN and MAM. With automatic archiving and syncing of all edit suites. All suits have Color Correction monitors Various IO decks and properly calibrated audio monitors, as well as all the other bells and whistles 🙂
Mike Jeffs
Production Services Manager
KPBS San Diego -
[Mike Jeffs] “…attached to a large SAN and MAM. With automatic archiving and syncing of all edit suites. All suits have Color Correction monitors Various IO decks…”
You ought to be in the $150-$250/hour range (including editor), depending on what your market and clientele can accept. That’s assuming you have some sort of client amenities, too.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “That’s assuming you have some sort of client amenities, too”
At PBS only the best that Viewers like you provide 🙂 Only joking our department self sustaining.
[Oliver Peters] “ou ought to be in the $150-$250/hour range (including editor)”
Doing that math I would say that’s pretty accurate to what we charge.
Mike Jeffs
Production Services Manager
KPBS San Diego -
How much use do your decks get these days? I assume there’s maybe a tape delivery but are you seeing much tape ingest anymore?
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[Mark Suszko] “You’re telling me a 100-to-300 dollar difference in the day rate between an editor with gear/no gear is going to be make or break for getting the gig, and I would respond that that amount of difference is barely the budget for a craft services table for one day, and this production therefore is probably not fully funded enough to make it to the martini shot, so I’m better off looking for another gig… is how I see it. “
It’s not an issue of what this costs relative to catering. A $100-$300 difference in the editor’s day rate of $500 is a 20-60% difference on that line item. Budgets are managed one line item at a time.
[Mark Suszko] “My take is, why even tell a client you have two rates for with/without gear? Fold the prorated costs of your gear into the computations of your day rate, which you should have done from the beginning. You come at one price, period. None of this ‘a la carte’ BS. All that does is give away control of how you do your work, giving that control away to someone who may not know anything about it.”
If you’re quoting labor and gear, you’re almost certainly working for an agency or production company. This is their business, and seeing the prices broken out this way is very often an expectation.
We really like working on project fees, where we’ll charge a fixed fee for a fixed scope, and we’re finding that some clients are happy to pass the risk of cost overage onto us for the safety of a known number in their budget. Others completely prefer to keep their accounting in the system they know, which is hours/days of separate labor and gear, carrying the risk themselves if work takes longer than expected. If we want to work for them, we have to price within their system.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Oliver Peters] “When you are talking about a suite, whether in an actual facility or your home office, there are plenty of other factors to consider beyond the workstation.”
I think the word “suite” itself has been diluted to the point where it’s meaningless. We could be talking about a couple of rooms with amenities for client supervision, or we could be talking about someone running their laptop on a kitchen table, or anything in between.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Andrew Kimery] “How much use do your decks get these days? I assume there’s maybe a tape delivery but are you seeing much tape ingest anymore?”
A smattering of hdcam here and there, a rare digibeta, But surprisingly a lot of Xdcam discs. There are quite a few places that invested heavily in that format and still use it to deliver footage, shows and others clips.
Of course that vast majority is digital files so we need every type of hard drive connection and card readers known to man. 🙂
Mike Jeffs
Production Services Manager
KPBS San Diego -
[Walter Soyka] “We really like working on project fees,”
You actually like it, or you have to like it? 🙂
The fixed price and fixed scope is often esoteric, especially in designed pieces.
We often have to deal with fixed prices, but it often happens where the job very quickly starts to expand out of the scope without knowing that they are asking that they are going out of scope. You ask for more, they say they don’t have it, and you’re stuck either fighting to give them less of what they want, or trying to get more money to cover the extra costs involved.
An hourly number, first of all, provides a level playing field. Prices start from a similar place every time and people can grasp the concept of what they are paying for. In production, this is often associated with more people, more talent, longer shoots, more equipment to get the results that are needed, any props/scenic/production design, etc. With post and design, people sometimes can’t see all the effort, so an estimated hourly/daily amount is an agreement, and as soon as they start asking for more, that agreement needs to be renegotiated. With fixed pricing, I find this is more difficult. You can end up working way over what the original scope entailed, and no one suffers except you.
I’d love to hear how you handle this differently or how you guide clients in to giving them what they are paying for on a fixed budget, even though they ask for much more.
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