Alas, Bouke, I fear I'm too old to seduce any rich guys! They're generally interested in women younger than I.
Much as I appreciate your input, I'm not sure it's useful to compare your wage to mine or anyone else's, unless we also do a detailed examination of what it really costs to live in various areas of the world. I certainly don't feel prepared to do that, but I can say that here in America freelancers like myself have to assume a lot of costs for health care, retirement, disability pay, etc. While I don't claim to know what your situation is, I do believe the US is really not like many of the other industrialized democracies of the world in terms of its social safety net.
Your statements also don't account for the fact that we were once paid a good deal more for this "craftsman's job" than we now are. I don't think the decline in wages has anything to do with the nature of the job; I believe it has to with larger trends relative to economic instability, the atomization of the television market, and the growth of corporate relative to labor power in my own country. As to the job itself, I now have twice the responsibility that I once had, and I do much of the work that my clients used to do in post. Once upon a time, I would be handed a script as a jumping off point at least; now, my clients often have not even seen the footage they shot. They simply hand it to me to make of it what I will, and they run off to the next thing claiming their attention (they're getting paid less too). The writing, the conceptual development, the music research and scene structuring, the story cutting, that's all up to me now. I happen to love this type of fundamental creativity (a good thing!), but it represents a big added investment of thought, and sometimes stress. I don't put the job down when I quit "working." It dominates my mental landscape and colors much of my life as long as it is going on. Is this a "craftsman's" job? If so, then I guess directors are craftsmen too, because it seems to me that increasingly, I'm doing their job in post as well.
Thanks again to everyone giving some thought to this little inquiry of mine. I'm wishing us all a more prosperous future!
Best,
Shirley
-----Original Message-----
From: bouke <bouke@editb.nl>
To: Avid-L2 <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Jul 9, 2012 12:43 pm
Subject: Re: [Avid-L2] Re: Editor rates in your area?
Ok,
Call me an arrogant asshole (which i happen to be).
But 50 to 60 bucks an hour is more than i make.
(and yes, i charge 150 an hour for small jobs (less than 2 hours), but that
includes my studio, and a shitload of experience.)
Sad news is, i never ever get this amount of money when i calculate my
unbillable hours (I study at least one day a week, and i never get paid for
my fuckups, let alone ingesting/rendering/social/stuff i do to make it so my
name can get on the credits without me complainig to leave it off, that
never leads to more work...).
Editing is/was/will ever be a craftmans job, and unless you excel, this is
what you get. (a plumbers wage.)
Now if it drops below that, i'll become a plumber/electrician/carpenter.
(plumbing i need to learn, the rest i can do with a one week course)
To make it worse, a normal application coder (that i also do) does NOT make
more money than this.
IOW, earn some money, get a pretty dress, seduce a rich guy.
(i married a doctor...)
Bouke
VideoToolShed
van Oldenbarneveltstraat 33
6512 AS NIJMEGEN
The Netherlands
+31 24 3553311
www.videotoolshed.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Shirley Gutierrez" <guanacaa@aol.com>
To: <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2012 9:30 PM
Subject: [Avid-L2] Re: Editor rates in your area?
> Many thanks to all of you who have responded. I'm still curious to know
> what goes in various areas, so I welcome more info if it's out there.
>
>
> Indeed, it seems the rates vary pretty significantly from region to
> region. But many of the rates I've seen in these replies are bad news,
> because whether we're talking about 3K a week with the potential to work
> 12 hour days, or $500 for ten hours, that's still a baseline rate of about
> $50 per hour. I can tell you that editors in cable broadcast were earning
> that in my relatively small market back in 1997, and I'm referring to the
> precise amount, not an inflation adjusted number. The one outlier rate
> posted, from the editor that quoted $700 a day for cable broadcast in the
> LA market, seems more like what we should be making by now.
>
>
> As an exercise, plug $50 into an inflation calculator, and you get $67.61
> in 2010 dollars (which is as recent as calculator will go). I'm not the
> greatest at math, so check me here, but doesn't this mean that some
> editors are earning approximately 73% of what they made in the 90s? That's
> not great news for the post production worker bee.
>
>
> As many of you might have surmised, my inquiry was motivated by the
> perception that it's high time to raise my own rates, which haven't budged
> by a penny in 10 years. Is this a good idea? I'm just not sure, but it
> would probably be easier to raise my rates if I weren't the only one doing
> it. And something tells me that if cable broadcasters can pay $700 a day
> in LA, they can probably pay it everywhere if they know they have to.
>
>
> Thanks again for all the good info. This list, as always, is a proving to
> be a real treasure.
>
>
> Best,
> Shirley
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
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