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Slightly OT: Rendering = billable time?
Greetings,
Just wondering what the norm is when it comes to how you bill your customers when your working on a per hour basis. If you work on a project for 10 hours, but in addition to that there is, say, 3 hours rendering, do you bill for 10 hours, 13 hours, or something in between? I’ve always been unsure about what the “right” thing to do is, so any insight on how you do it would be highly appreciated!
Kind regards,
Eric -
3 Replies
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You should try the Broadcast Design or Business forums, Eric. Try searching on “rates” or “hour”
Steve 🙂
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Billing your client for rendering times is just fair. Of course the rates are lower than for the interactive work part, but that’s ok. You know, even if you’re not in front of it, your computer consumes power, gets older wears out and uses software which also needs to be paid and updated once in a while. It’s actually quite easy to have projects where the rendering times are longer than the time it took to create them (those with massive numbers of 3D layers and motion blur for instance) and in the 3D world, where I originally come from, it’s almost always like that – you create a scene in 3 days but it renders for a week with all the fancies such as reflections and refractions.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Personally I think you should build render times invisibly into your rate/ bids. An hourly rate for rendering time can get you into some problems with pricing integrity, among other things. For instance, an hourly charge for rendering rewards you for using slower machines to render on. Also, if you’re bidding against someone who has no line item on their bid for rendering time, you could be at a disadvantage both from the pricing perspective and from a perception perspective.
For similar reasons this is why I no not use an hourly charge for my services. It makes no sense in a creative business. If NBC calls you tomorrow and wants you to design them a new logo to replace the peacock, and you have your best design day ever and create something they love in 2 hours, are you going to send them a bill for $150 and call it a day? Hell no! Hourly rates reward people for being slow and often don’t take into account the value of creative or the value of what’s being delivered. You should be able to adjust your bid independently of an hourly rate taking into account who you’re working for and what you’re delivering. Hourly rates make more sense in an edit suite where you can expect a somewhat more consistent output of work per hour, but in design things are not so reliable.
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