How much should I charge(not hourly) for this video intro template adaptation I did?

[Rich Rubasch]

Can you say how many hours you had modifying the original template? Not seeing the complexity of the comps, maybe $500-800 depending on how many hours it took to work the new logo into the template with the tweaking.

Would have been interesting to use a different music track even though the template one works. Would have really made it unique to the client’s logo.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Todd Terry]

I was going to ask a couple of questions that Rich touched on….

How many hours did it take you? I don’t have any concept of how long it took you to customize that template… 30 minutes or 10 hours or what… but that’s important.

Is there any certain reason you don’t want to do just an hourly-based price on this?

And… did you do this for a client before giving them a cost? Or at least an estimate??

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Davor Raić]

Hey, thanks for your responses guys. This has been my first time working with element 3d and I’ve had quite some technical difficulties along the way, so I took me quite some time to do this. Over the course of two weeks, i’ve invested around 5-10 hours into working on the project. And like 15 hours of rendering and exporting(beacuase of both tech difficulties and client not being sure what he needs).
I’ve done it more as a favor, but now my client insists on paying me for it. And I have absolutely no idea how the pricing goes.
I was about to ask him for 100€, but I want to be sure that I’m not underestimating my own work too much 🙂

[Todd Terry]

Well, at that rate you are giving it away for next to nothing.

I understand you had some issues, and in a way this was a learning exercise. Think of it this way, if you were completely up to speed and fully proficient… how long would it take you? Three hours? Four? More? Less? I would charge for this project based on that.

Plus you said this was as a “favor”… is it a good friend or colleague? You can factor that in.

And rates are different everywhere… but here in our shop I’d say this was about a 750 to thousand-buck project, if done as a regular paying job.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

Todd is right as usual. And if you had to do extra re-renders because of new client input or changes, you should charge.

It’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had multiple times, on if you want to charge a lower rate for rendering unattended, compared to your time spent actively creating and supervising something. My personal sense of it is, if the render job takes the equipment out of production for anything else, then it’s not out of line to charge one standard hourly rate. If it’s an overnight unattended render that doesn’t interfere with other work, you could choose to discount that render.

If you feel guilty learning on the client’s time while trying something new, you could pro-rate or discount a few hours off the total and not say anything about it. But the work we all do ultimately is all based on our giving our time to the project. The hours are the expression of the effort to make the product. If the product is gorgeous or “just okay”, the hours are still the hours.

Calculate your hourly and day rates and try to stick to them as much as you can, regardless to extraneous factors.

[Steve Kownacki]

Don’t forget to add the $21 for the template and $8 for the music track. Looks like you don’t need extended licenses.
Who searched for the template? That Producer time is billable too.

Steve