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Hourly Job – Charge Rendering Time?
So I have an editing job going right now where the guy wants to pay hourly. Should I be charging for rendering time (aka any time I’m not actively doing anything at the computer) or is that “wrong”?
15″ MacBook Pro Quad Core i7 2.0GHz
1TB G-RAID
Final Cut Pro X
Canon T2i -
7 Replies
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If you do it during the day while you are there working, and waiting for it to happen…yes, charge for it. If you do it at night, when you leave for the day…I say no. I charge for the time I am there working, and a flat fee for my equipment rental. When I leave for the day, I am done, and the equipment is rendering and working. It is already paid for, and my time is done at that point.
But for the times I work during the day and I need to render to see what I am doing, yes, of course I charge for that.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Yeah that makes sense. An example of my common situation is capturing tapes…if I start capturing and walk away from the computer, while it’s working, to do other things – and keep checking if it’s done yet…
It’s not like I set up a capture and go on vacation and come back and charge for those hours, haha. But I was just curious what the norm for professionals would be.
An hour tape to capture = 1 hour of work charged more or less?
15″ MacBook Pro Quad Core i7 2.0GHz
1TB G-RAID
Final Cut Pro X
Canon T2i -
Loading footage in time, should be billable, IMO.
Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC -
Rendering, capturing all that type of work is billable.
While the machine is doing that, it is not earning an editing rate and it is accumulating hours.
A good (and fair) compromise is to have a sliding scale for ‘other’ services.
One downside of this is the added complication of keeping track of it. The ‘Time Tracking’ type programs that accountants, lawyers and architects often use is a solution.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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If it’s an edit job that is completely intertwined with the editing (i.e. edit for five minutes, render for 30 seconds… edit for 30 minutes, render for 10), then that’s just all billable at our normal editing rate here. There would be no practical way to split it out anyway, and it ties up the same suite and same editor the whole time.
On the rare occasion that we do a job that requires tons of off-hours rendering when a suite would otherwise just be sitting unused and no editor needed (such as an overnight render), then we bill that at a lower rate.
We recently did a :30 commercial that was all Cinema 4D generated. The 3D models were all glass and chrome (trophies) so it was fairly render-intensive, about a week’s worth of continuous rendering. We didn’t charge full rate for that rendering since the machines were just cranking on that unattended 24/7 until it was done.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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All three answers are correct. Full rate if you are attending/monitoring and you and the machines are thus tied up, unable to do anything else for anyone else. Overnight, un-attended renders, a lower rate, but still not free, because it is using your assets.
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[Todd Terry] “If it’s an edit job that is completely intertwined with the editing (i.e. edit for five minutes, render for 30 seconds… edit for 30 minutes, render for 10), then that’s just all billable at our normal editing rate here.”
Agreed, that is what I do as well. What I referred to earlier was bulk type operations outside of a normal edit session. I didn’t think to mention coffee break renders during a session, glad you brought it up!
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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