Need Help! Do you charge clients for Rendering?

[Paul Carlin]

Personally, I try to bid per job, not by the hour. Be sure to specify the number of revisions before additional charges apply in the contract. This is the sure fire way to get the client to stop making changes… when it will cost them.

To answer the question, I don’t think it would be good to put that as a line item on the invoice. Pad the regular hours to make up for any time you lost, and bill only for one thing… work.

To avoid the render hit in your situation, look into using PROXY images. You could resize the images to something reasonable (in Photoshop) and tell After Effects to SET PROXY to these smaller images. This saves you the time of re-scaling everything in the comps. Be sure to specify in the render settings to USE ALL PROXIES or the render will default back to the original images. You will also notice a dramatic improvement in your GUI interaction while working with proxies.

[Steve Roberts]

Yep, I bill per job as well, and specify the number of revisions covered in the estimate.

I don’t also list line items, unless they’re something like third-party DVD duplication.

Render time is not an issue lately (8-core!), so I only factor it in if it’s onerous, or if it’s a rush job. But it’s not a line item.

You may get more info by searching the Business or Broadcast Design COW forums for “render” or “rendering”.

[Aaron Zander]

also think of it this way when it comes to render time, i used to have an invoiced job which was all hourly and i explained rendering to them (they weren’t computer savy) the guy had a previous company that did helicopter work on features

he had air hours, ie hours he was in the air using the chopper and the gass
and he had standby hours, time he and his chopper were being used but weren’t expending gass or flying through the skies.

so basicly your either working you butt off behind the computer, or rendering on it, since the rendering isn’t using your talent, just your hardware you could in theory charge a standby rate.

[Johnsabbath D’urzo]

how much would you charge for a render? let’s say 1 hour, would it be right to do a % of the hourly rate? and would it be right to charge for a rush job like 24 hours or less, maybe a % as well?

[Joey Burnham]

We charge by individual gfx here, not render time. And it’s always a flat rate. So if it takes me an hour to do one card and 5 minutes on another, it’s still the same. At least the clients know every time what it costs. Why should they have to pay extra for how fast / slow your machine is?
Or you could just get Nucleo and keep working while rendering
Joey

[Jimmy Brunger]

I used to (reluctantly) charge for rendering at my old facility…due to my boss’s say so. Our PCs were pitifully slow and I thought it was a bit of a cheek tbh, so I used to at least half the render hours to charge out. This was in a facility environment though where it is needed there and now (so you’d have thought we’d be using sh*t hot hardware no?!?) so overnight renders weren’t really applicable. But generally you should factor in *something* for rendering, if only to cover wear on your system(s)..but this shouldn’t be much. I mean – you charge machine time for pro VTRs to cover head wear, so it’s similar..

Nucleo Pro kind of renders all this irrelevant anyway (sorry for pun) – just background render and everybody’s happy! We charge by the job at my new place – but they’re longer projects over several weeks/months so that makes total sense. Unless you’re a facility with the very best gear I think quote per job is probably the norm.

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