> haus wrote:
> a little OT (although I think workflow is an
> important issue to overall speed and MC's effect
> handling slows the process down significantly, but...),
> but how are you figuring what to charge? Do you
> have a day rate or does the facility state what
> it can pay per job?
This completely varies from one project to the next and from one client to another. I personally charge based on a day rate as a preference. One rate for just me and another for myself+gear. The latter only applies on the few gigs I do at home or when I do gigs on location (like corporate meeting videos).
If I'm working for a facility as an editor-for-hire, then I charge an hourly or day rate. A lot of the projects are ones in which I'm sort of a collaborator in the process. These are the ones where a production company handles the post and they've bid the entire package. I will look at the editorial side and bid the amount of time that I feel it will take. In some cases there's some necessary negotiation to win the total job. So if they eat some, my total bill will go down as well. Meaning, I might think it will take 6 days (which it usually does), but I can only bill for 5 days, as that's the agreed-upon fixed bid.
This is good for me, because I get repeat business and also the starting point is always my asking rate. I feels it's better to maintain the rate and absorb an extra day, then to bill the accurate amount of time, but at a lower hourly rate. That's because in the future, when you bid the next job again, the discussion starts at the base rate, not the new, discounted rate you ended up at last time.
Remember that I work long-form (films, docs, TV) as well as short-form (spots, corporate) and those two sides of the business have completely different rate structures. Commercials tend to be based on large hourly or daily rates, but films and TV don't.
So I will bid the edit on a film based on a weekly rate with the assumption of a certain number of weeks. I will "bid" this based on the script and my reading of the client, with hopefully enough caveats to prevent getting burned if things go horribly wrong. So when I look at a short-form project, like a series of spots and I'm working 6 days straight, but billing for 5, odds are that I'm still earning more money for that week than I would if it had been part of a film edit. Of course, on the film edit job, the lower weekly income is offset by x-number of weeks of guaranteed work.
So, in the end, workflow and efficiency are very important, as it's all about controlling costs.
- Oliver
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