How many billable hours should it take to edit a project?

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Benjamin,

Buy any length of a string, roll it out on the road and you’ll get your answer 🙂

In the old days a rule of thumb was 1 hour of editing per 1 minute finished. Sometimes in news and sport it is 15-20 minutes of editing for 2-5 minutes of finished…

Today, Normally! Your hours in the edit is defined by your clients budget and/or their dead-line.

All the Best
Mads
London, UK

Here used to be a big video – now you can watch another one here:
https://www.macmillion.com/showreel.htm

Mac Million Ltd. – HD Production & Editing
Blog: https://macmillionltd.blogspot.com

[Ed Cilley]

Benjamin,

There are way too many factors that enter into the equation to give you a definitive answer. Many of the people here have asked this same question with every edit we book, schedule or bid on.

– How accurate are the scripts/timecodes?
– Do you have transcripts in case the client wants to make changes? This will effect how quickly you can access footage.
– How is the b-roll used? Is it simple cuts, or are they looking for layered effects?
– Are the interviews green screen? This will affect edit time.
– Are you building an open and close to the program? An open can take a few hours or a few days depending on what your client is looking for.
– Sound. How is music and sound effects used?

I know there are at least a dozen other questions I would ask going into an edit like this, but this is a good start.

I have edited 10 minute interviews with b-roll and it has taken 15 hours. I have also edited 10 minute interviews with b-roll and it has taken 40 hours. Like Mads said above,

[Mads Nybo Jørgensen] “Your hours in the edit is defined by your clients budget and/or their dead-line.”

Sorry we can’t give you a better answer.

Ed

Avid and FCP Preditor
_________________________________________________
Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield

[Rich Rubasch]

I’ve been editing for 17 years. In the example you gave, we cut about 4-6 minutes of video in an 8 hour day. So for a 10 minute video, if I am not starting with a script, but rather only have a pile of interviews and Broll, but I know what the story is supposed to convey, and also assuming the footage is uploaded into the edit system, then you will probably find that from 8:30 in the morning until about 5:30 in the evening that you will have 5 minutes or less cut. Probably less on the first day. The next day you will have some rhythm going so you might get more finished.

On the third day you will be adding music, mixing in nat sound, maybe tweaking some edits and doing basic color correction.

So I would give myself a minimum of three days to cut a 10 minute video. Most of what we cut lately is much shorter. As long as there is not a huge amount of animation or compositing to do we an cut a 2-3 minute video in a day pretty easily.

We move pretty fast on the keyboard and we have a lot of experience, so mileage may vary.

FYI we also calculate anywhere between $500-$1000 per finished minute of editing depending on how aggressive we get.

Helpful?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Chris Blair]

We typically budget that we can get 2-3 minutes edited per day when produce long-form projects. Same goes for shooting a long-form piece, we typically expect to get 2-3 minutes of material shot each day.

However, editing interview based pieces is a little different in that it typically takes a lot more prep time to get interviews down to a form that allows you to edit them….meaning we typically send interviews to a transcription service (typically $2/minute of interview), and spend about a day or two trimming interviews down to what we call “selects.”

So for an interview based piece, we’ll add about 2 days for logging, digitizing, transcription (we send this out) and the “select take” editing.

Of course, if your video is shot in more of “news” style where the interview only consists of a handful of questions and answers, you might be able to skip all the transcription and interview trimming and adhere to the 2-3 minutes per day formula. But if you have 5 or more interviews and each interview consists of 20 minutes of answers, it takes some time to get those trimmed into something that resembles a story.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog

[Craig Seeman]

Maybe with some irony all the above indicated to me that there is not “typical” time. It depends on the type of project and your estimation, as a professional, as to the most efficient workflow.

That’s one of the important aspects of “experience” people often overlook. You can be creative, you can be fast. Experience makes you better able to estimate time and evaluate the optimal workflow.

Rather than ask what the “typical” time is, the better question would be is, “how do you estimate the time to do this project.” Then if you provide all the details, we can evaluate as if it were a project handed to us. If there’s missing information we can ask for it as if we were asking such clarification to a client. That would inform you that you need to ask additional questions to the client.

BTW this is why I warn clients when they ask for estimates based on unseen material. Eight hours of interview material can range from finding bad take after bad take, pieces parts to takes together to make a good take, having cogent but verbose answers that need to be cut down, complete self standing takes, whether there are production notes and how good are those notes. Then there’s the production quality issues such as the need for time to color correct or fix audio problems. You can’t know that until you’ve seen the sources.

In my experience, if you don’t have or know the client’s based history, it’s hard to know “typical” and can be dangerous to give an estimate. You may grossly underestimate for a client who had an inexperienced production crew. You may also overestimate if the client had veteran, organized, talented production crew.

You simply can’t know by “x” hours of source material. I personally have found assuming a “reasonable” amount of preparedness on the client’s side a dangerous thing.

On the other hand I find it easiest to estimate when I (or someone I’m familiar with) is handling the production. When I worked for good production/post production houses I, as an editor, was usually called in to the production meeting so I could advise on the best way to prep the material for post. As a “mom & pop” now, I’d make similar suggestions or ask similar questions to prospective post clients as I would in my facility days.

I certainly have many “fun” stories to tell that have gotten me to where I am in my thinking. For the sake of brevity I’ll leave that for some future post.

[Mark Suszko]

Depends on the kind of job as well. In news, time is the tyrant, so if you have a 1-hour deadline, you WILL deliver a product in under one hour. How GOOD that product will be is a variable. When the project offers enough time to stretch out and get creative, and it is the kind of project that benefits fro trying various approaches or building complex sub-sequences and layers, etc., well, then the edit expands to fill whatever time is allotted, and of course your quality is going to be much better. A very simple, linear job can be cut super-fast, or, if you have to do a lot of repair, maybe even some rotoscoping or motion tracking, then you’re looking at more time.

[Benjamin Reichman]

Thanks all! Even though there’s no single answer to my question, it’s more helpful than you might realize to get a variety of “ballpark” answers from the COW.

Craig, I’d love to hear some of those “fun” stories.

Ed, I don’t think I’ll have script notes, transcriptions, or much of anything in the way of guidance. So I’ll make sure I have time to mark up the interviews in FCP (I don’t think it’ll be practical for me to pay a transcription service.)

Rich, your advice is very helpful. As I work, I’ll keep all of that in mind and see how my pace compares.

Mark, I understand what you mean about the work filling the available space. There’s always more that can be done to improve a piece!

At the moment, I’m still waiting to hear even the basic details of the project (beyond what I posted above), but if and when I do, I’ll follow up here as needed.

And now back to editing (a different, very small project)…

[Patrick Ortman]

Agree, and it’s VERY hard to give a client a hard estimate sometimes. For instance, right now we’re editing a project that does not have a script. Seriously. It’s a little crazy, so it means a lot more time spent figuring out what we have, what the story should be, etc.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable to bill more, or go to an hourly model if you find yourself in this situation.

———————
http://www.patrickortman.com
Web and Video Design

[Craig Seeman]

[Mark Suszko] “In news, time is the tyrant, so if you have a 1-hour deadline, you WILL deliver a product in under one hour.”

Yup, I’ve done VNRs like that. Of course in a case like that the time is a hard given so you can estimate very easily. They either give you notes or you just grab the best bites and b-roll you find given x amount of time hunting and then you chop it together.

[Mark Suszko] “t is the kind of project that benefits fro trying various approaches or building complex sub-sequences and layers, etc., well, then the edit expands to fill whatever time is allotted”

Yes, and that’s when budget question leads. I can give you X hours for Y dollars and I can do Z in that time span and budget. Sometimes you can give a report when delivering the first rough cut which includes dollars spent and they determine whether they want to expand the budget or just do minor revisions.

[Craig Seeman]

[Benjamin Reichman] “Craig, I’d love to hear some of those “fun” stories.”

Here’s one. Customer from a well known higher end production company has an inflexible budget for a low end job. In this case they’re doing a marketing video for a test (unreleased) product. The job is basically cutting B-roll with some on location positive product statements from those trying the product. In theory the only tough part would be digging out the positive statements as there’s no guarantee there will be many.

They’re only shooting a couple of days and given the above it’s easy to predict the range amount of video. There’s no FX work. Just good edit pacing. Even the run time is very narrow. Given the description and the budget I felt “piece of cake” what can go wrong? Based on my two decades of experience this job is two day edit and maybe one day revision.

So I get the two days of video. It was shot in a couple of bar/nightclubs (as expected).
The tapes come in and won’t play on my deck. It seems the camera has record head tracking issues.
I ask for the camera or otherwise they can do a transfer from camera to another camera or deck.
They inform me the camera isn’t available and they too can’t play the tapes.
A couple of days later they get the camera and transfer the video for me straight to hard drive.

I play the video and all the audio is digital distortion, so heavy that I can barely hear interviews. The meters are nailed. It’s as if they had the audio maxed and didn’t monitor on headphones. Even if the load environment made it difficult to listen on headphones, the meters on the camera would have made it obvious they were steady pinned.

And the video is about as bad. It’s almost completely black. Shadows at best. Where they even looking in the eyepiece or LCD? One can forget to turn on the meters in some cameras but black is black. Even though gained up would have been grainy at least there would have been usable video for b-roll.

The result all this would embarrass even the newest intern or freshman film student. It’s as if the person had never used a camera before and didn’t even think to look and ask for help. I called the client and aid there is nothing usable. Apparently the producer hadn’t seen the video and didn’t believe me (the producer hadn’t done the transfer of course and whoever did, didn’t tell him. I told they’d have to reshoot the whole thing and the deadline was about upon us. They got the hard drives and confirmed I was not exaggerating. Since I really hadn’t done anything other that make an attempt to play tapes and a scan of unsalvageable shoot material I was OK with giving them more time although their turnaround would be like one and a half days.

The second shoot tapes where much better . . . and after getting a first cut on day one and phoned in revision and they got what should have been the final cut on day two . . . which they said was a drop dead deadline and would have to live with whatever it was. Then came a few “quick” revisions. At this point they had gone passed their “drop dead” deadline and I said they’d really have to pay for more time. They said it would be just a couple of small revisions and they promised it would never happen again and it would just be for the very next day. I agreed and told them that I was booked after that (I was).

I handed in the “final” revisions and then they said “a few more.” My response was NO and even if they could pay I can’t do it because I was booked on another job which would tie me up for a couple of weeks. They would have to hand it to another editor (which they did). The shorted me a very few dollars on their last payment just out of spite since they knew it was too small to fight over.

Some lessons are:
You can’t estimate based on the job and client’s past reputation (doing excellent movie trailers doesn’t mean) they hired competent people to produce marketing videos.
Clients may assume an estimate is a locked budget even if you tell them otherwise. If they have a locked budget you express your price is locked hours. That includes revisions and the client has to pay beyond that and that point the bill for work done must be settled before continuing.
I may give a client a low/high range based on a description but I’m not inclined to put that in writing. They must include a written description and agreed timeline and I get to screen the material first otherwise they’re hourly/daily rate.

More stories to come.