OT: Vegas editing costs for 3 cam 2-day shoot

ken c wrote on 6/3/2006, 9:53 AM

Hi -

As it's taking a lot of work for me to do all the editing for my seminars, I wanted to ask for your all's help in letting me know what realistic budgets are for this type of editing project...

What do you think would be an average total rough price for editing a 2-day 3-cam seminar in Vegas, into 12 DVDs? Not necessarily *your* personal rates, but just a rough guesstimate of what an average (if there is such a thing!) project would cost, done very professionally?

The seminars I do, I have 3 cameras, and I want "intelligent camera cuts" every 8 to 30 seconds max between them (absolutely required), for roughly 16 hours of final edited footage (from 20 hours or so of source from each of the 3 cams).

It's an enormous task, takes me months each time, to get it right ... including audio editing/sound correction, subtitling where needed for main points, and then creating let's say 12 DVDs from the footage using jump backs etc.

source: non-synced/non smpte encoded raw footage on avis on 3 hard drives, to use in final projects .. (I use ultimate S2, works great) Many seminar videos I see are "amateur hour", eg just single-cam dumps to video, that's definitely *not* what I'm talking about. My videos are near broadcast-quality, with jump backs/ETK, motion menu video footage backs, title overlays, solid animation + tight/clean/focused editing for content.

Any rough ideas on total project cost, from you who are experienced video editors?

thanks much,

ken

(by the way, I'm asking for your help on sharing your thoughts on rough budget estimates on this, because doing my own video editing is a major business bottleneck for me, as I have over a dozen new DVDs/CDs I'm producing for market in the next year ahead, so I'm trying to estimate budgets for this, for business planning - much appreciated!)

Comments

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 6/3/2006, 11:19 AM

Generally there is a dayrate or hourly rate for editing (do you need color correction as well?) You're talking a fairly substantial amount of money here.

Generally I charge around $50/hr for editing. If there is very involved work it will go up somewhat because of the necessity of more powerfull software/equipment, such as substantial compositing that can't be done in Vegas, but that doesn't apply here.

I don't know how my corporate rates compare to others (that's what I would categorize this under) but I know guys that charge 200/hr for their editing, so I hope that gives you some idea.

As far as doing a full edit on this plus production of 12 DVD masters, I would roughly guestimate... 60hrs of ingesting, then editing multicam down to 16 hrs of footage from 3 cams, that alone would cost a LOT of money with "inteligent cuts" and sans the audio sweetening you're probably talking a solid $3,000.00 just for that, I don't know - depending on the audio quality we could be talking somewhere in the 5,000-8,000 range, Then mastering DVD's?

I would say that I wouldn't be expecting anyone who does this for a living to do it for less than say 8-12K.

Dave

GlennChan wrote on 6/3/2006, 11:41 AM

You can take Dave's approach, but probably tack on some factor (i.e. 50%) to the estimated hours for client revisions. If an editor is quoting you, then should really be factoring that in.

The guys charging $200/hr is with equipment included... and that's really with a lot of equipment that's not necessary for your project (decks, pricey editing system, etc.). i.e. because you're making DVDs, a lot of their decks aren't necessary.

Logan5 wrote on 6/3/2006, 12:21 PM

I would roll iso tape in the 3 different cameras & also have a TD do live switching.
You could save a lot of ingest with a good TD on site.
If you needed a different shot in post, you could just load the tape from the relating iso cam.

I would charge $1000 hr for that kind of setup.

I’ve done on site editing at casinos in Vegas & convention videos.
One thing to check if you shoot inside a casino convention area, some of them are union.
We had a convention at the Flamingo Hilton with 4 cams, video Rollins and we had to either have the union guys do the job or pay them to “shadow us.”
At the Rio we had almot the same set up with no Union no worries. less$$$

Dach wrote on 6/3/2006, 12:50 PM

It comes down to the billing rate per hour. This will depend on the requirements and geographical area that the work is being done in.

I have heard ranges of $45.00 to $400 per hour for editing.

In any scenario always add a contigency % to any budget.

Per the previous post... living video switching may be good way to reduce the budget.

Chad

ken c wrote on 6/4/2006, 4:31 AM

thanks very much - that's useful, and sounds reasonable for the workload involved.. appreciate the insights too re the different factors involved ...

anyone else? estimates of what a budget would be (roughly speaking) for a project of the type described above?

appreciate it,

ken