Hourly Rate

I charge either flat or hourly depending on the job and how much time I have. I have a full-time job and do freelancing, so I don't usually have time to do full 10-hour days for freelancing. Therefore, it's tougher to clock hours and keep track of how long I work on projects...usually a few hours here, there. Those projects I charge by the finished minute...and that depends on what's involved. So if I'm charging $300/finished minute and the video turns out to be 5 minutes, that's $1500. That's mostly because I don't know how long it's going to take me to complete, and if the client's cool with that, it's cool. If not, I usually charge daily for shoots, hourly for editing: ~$250/day for shooting, ~$50/hour for editing.

Jonathan

$1500-2000 isn't unheard of for a wedding. In fact, where I used to work, that was somewhere near the low end of the scale. It all depends on your clients. Yea, people are cheap. But if you deliver a good product, especially for something as important as a wedding, they will pay for it.

Of course, this company served high end clients who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their weddings or children's bar/batmitzvahs. My boss once shot a wedding on 35mm from a helicopter, and another time we were even contracted to videotape the funeral service for the CEO of a major corporation. So there is a high end market out there.

Mac Pro 2.66Ghz - 3GBs RAM - X1900XT Mac OS X (10.4.8)