How Much Does It Cost to Produce Video?

Video. Do you love it? Do you hate it? It doesn’t matter. Asdevelopers or designers of eLearning, video is an increasing part of the workwe create. You already know that. Usually you get a budget, one that you knowis too small to work with. You do what you have to do to make your budgets work.

Making video in the eLearning space might have the sameparts as a Hollywood production, but it’s not the same on many levels. IneLearning, we have to work harder and smarter to make our productions makesense to our learning audience. Truly, the hardest question to answer when weget an idea (or are told to get an idea) for a video is, “How much will it reallycost to make?”

Will it be the video of your dreams or your nightmares? A storytellingvideo is a very different project than an actor or subject matter expert (SME)talking to a camera, whether it’s made with the camera in the lid of a laptopor in a studio. Even if it seems simple, there are a lot of moving parts tokeep in mind when you’re trying to figure out how much to budget for your videoproduction. Here are ideas that can guide you so you can “Make it work!”

What’s involved in video production

Creating video is a process. Your cost for video production willbe different from my cost of video production. It comes down to where you are andwhat’s involved in your particular production; for example, how much equipmentto rent or buy? How many actors?

The list of needs can be almost endless. Everything you docosts your department, company, or yourself money and time. When it comes to videoproduction spending, you need to spend those hard-to-come-by production dollarswisely, with as much of the expense showing on the screen as possible. Since thereare so many factors to consider when you’re calculating how to develop yourvideo and cost it out, I’ll probably miss a few, but here’s my list.

DIY or outsource?

When you get a script or idea, the first thing to consideris this: are you going to make it yourself or are you going to hire a companyor individual to make the video? In the past, video production companies havemostly quoted the “price” of a video by the cost per finished minute. Theproduction company would look at the script and figure out how much to chargeincluding their markup. Changes are extra. If a script has several locationsaway from your office, there are transportation, set-up, and equipment chargesalong with other costs over and above your own costs. If you’re lucky and youwork at a corporate campus, it’s a little easier as there are lots of freelocations to select. You still have to allow time to move the equipment to yourlocation(s), unpack, set it up, light the set, and block your actors (establishwhere they are on the set and where they move). Even with a script, sometimes there’sstill too much speculation in figuring the costs exactly. With some knowledgeof how to think about production process and costs, you’ll be getting more andmore accurate as you are involved in more video productions.

Pre-production

This is the most important part of any video production. Letme give you a few words about pre-production decisions before I lay out theactual steps. Most of the decisions you make in pre-production will show up in yourfinished product. Here are some of the questions to think about and decisionsyou will be making as you do your pre-production planning.

• What is the first major decision after you haveyour script?
  • Did you get your script from an SME?
  • Is it already a video script?
  • Do you have to rewrite it to make the words makesense and transform it into a video script?
  • Is someone else going to write it?
• Are you going to shoot “on-location”?
  • Is the location in the office or outside theoffice?
  • If it’s away from your office, do you have topay for the venue?
  • If it’s in the office space, will you have torecord after hours—or can you get it done during normal business hours?
• Do you need actors? 
  • Do you have on-camera actors (assuming that youneed them at all)?
  • Are they internal actors in your own company ordo you have to audition and hire them?
• What equipment are you going to use? Do you needto purchase or rent anything? Will you need more than one camera (a multi-camerashoot)?
• How many days will it take to shoot the project?

And perhaps the most important question of all: do you alreadyhave an approved budget, or do you have to submit a budget? If you’ve alreadygot a budget approved, you still have to do the budget part below. The budgetis more than numbers. It’s a roadmap to how you’ll spend your money so you makethe most of it on the screen.

The steps in pre-production are:

1. Figure out what you’re going to be doing. Stand-uptalking head? Tell a story? Sounds simple, right? It’s not! (See the sidebar,“4K Video?” in case you are thinking you need “hi-fi” state-of-the-art video.)
2. Get a script. Get an SME to write it. Then studyit and figure out what kind of video you really need to make. Get your ideasdown on paper: at least make notes in the borders of the script pages as youstudy the script, or whatever works for you—notepad, sketchpad, Moleskine or other handy notebook, even the occasional back of an envelope. Or use yoursmartphone or tablet: Evernote,Noteshelf, GoodNotes, or any other cross-platform software that savesyour notes in an easy-to-share format.
3. Start your storyboard. No, not an instructionaldesign storyboard! People who work in the moving picture business have beenusing visual storyboards since before 1900. It’s a representation of whatscenes you want to make and what you want to see. It only has to speak to you,so it doesn’t have to be a work of art or a masterpiece of drawing.
4. Start a spreadsheet. On the spreadsheet, makethe first column your expense items; i.e. camera and lens rental, otherequipment, actors, crew, etc. Everything that comes out of your “pocket.” Thenext column should be a cost per day, with a notation for items that have noseparate cost per day. To the right, columns for each day of shooting and afinal column of totals for each item. You must total the expenses totaled andfoot them at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
5. Figure out your costs—the spreadsheet you juststarted will also be your template for other productions. I can’t know whatthings cost in your market unless I’ve worked there, but you need to plan foreverything that will have to be paid out of pocket, charged, or billed. Thisincludes lunch for the crew, replacements for burned out lamps, and batteriesfor different equipment. Some of these things are or should be part of yourproduction kit, but you’ve got to charge for them even if you call it miscellaneousor overhead. You have to make allowances for everything you can possibly thinkof and there will still be a surprise or two.
6. Scope out your locations, hire your actors andother production crew. Make sure you’ve scheduled everything and give yourselfand your crew enough production time to finish the job.

A lot of the production I do doesn’t involve actors. Itcertainly makes my life easier. As a director who has worked with many actors,both professional and “regular” people (as in non-actor), I usually prefer tomake non-actors comfortable in front of the camera and let them be themselves.It can be way more fun and it’s far less expensive. Whether you’re using actorsor not, you have to think about how you will set things up and that’s not justyour physical set.

Production

This is the most important part of any video production. Theday dawns bright and clear, or rainy or snowy as the case may be. The nightbefore the shoot, you’ve checked all your gear:

• Batteries are all charged. You have plenty of sparebatteries for the non-rechargeable devices.
• Plenty of fasteners—like clips, little bungeecords, duct tape—are all on hand.
• Spare bulbs for all your lights (unless you’reusing LEDs).
• All equipment is ready to rock and roll.

You have all your equipment checked out and ready to go, sonow all you have to do is go to the location. Maybe your office? Maybesomewhere else? Wherever, get there early. It always takes longer than youthink to set up the first time in any location. But since this is about costs,let’s get into the costs of production and where they can bite you.

Production costs and potential budget-buster points:

1. Camera equipment rental—if you don’t have theright camera(s) and lenses, then you will have to rent even more equipment.Worse would be if you own a camera and lenses (or a camera with a built inlens), and you don’t have the right equipment for your shoot … that would bebad pre-production … but just so you know, at the high end, a Red Epic-X “kit”is about $900 a day. That can add up fast. Did you get the right tripod, dollyor slider, fluid head, or other support for your camera? A whole tripod “kit”can cost you about $150 a day over and above your camera. Do you need a monitorto look at your work? That’s another $50 – $70 a day. You can see how this canadd up. And if you don’t have the right equipment, then you have to wait forthe right equipment and that means extra time and of course, time-equals-money.Always.
2. Lights—same as the camera(s), but at least a bitless expensive. Different cameras take different light because their sensorsreact differently to the light that’s there. As an example, if you’re using aphone camera and you’re shooting outside and it’s a sunny day, you’ll need lotsof lights balanced for daylight or tons of reflectors. Phone cameras can takebeautiful pictures, but they need very “quiet” light, which simply means itneeds to be flat without shadows. Or if you’re using a DSLR or a real videocamera, you’ll still need at least five lights to set it up properly. Lightscan cost about $10 – 20 a day to rent.
3. Microphones—did you rent the best microphone? Doyou have enough and the right kinds of mics? If you have a cast of more thanone, do you need to put lavalieres on them? Or will it sound better with ashotgun mic? Or are they sitting at a table and need table mics? You need to answerthese kinds of questions before you walk onto your set. Microphones can cost upto $50 a day to rent. And you still need cables and batteries. It’s all àla carte.
4. Cast—do you have your cast all lined up? Arethey expecting to be paid? Do you have all the roles filled? Do you need peopleto populate the office? These bodies are called extras and you might need topay for them, especially if you didn’t line them up before your production.
5. Crew—having enough people to operate theequipment is important. Are you going to use a boom mic? Then you need a boomoperator. Do you have several microphones? Then you need a sound person to makesure the recordings sound correct. Lots of lights? Then you need a gaffer (theelectrical person who attends to the lights, etc.). The list goes on. If you’resure you can do all this yourself, more power to you.
6. Cables—one of two items that’s out there as a big “hangin’ gotcha” because if you needa mic cable or an extension cord or whatever carries electrons, and you don’thave it, you’ll have to get it and that means time and money.
7. Batteries—do you have enough “juice” to poweryour cameras, lights, mics, etc.? If you don’t, and your camera uses aproprietary battery, you’d better have at least one spare. If you run out ofjuice, you can’t just run to the drugstore any more. This can get veryexpensive if you have to run to Best Buy and get a few of those proprietarybatteries for your camera.
8. Fasteners—do you have enough clips, tape, andother things that keep objects out of the way of the camera and out of theframe. If you don’t have enough (and you never have enough!) then you’llpossibly have to stop the production and go out and get what you need.

If you’ve done your preproduction homework, then yourproduction set will play out easily and smoothly—except there’s alwayssomething that will go wrong. Any and all of the costs you came up with in yourpre-production scheduling and budgeting can go awry if you haven’t thoughtabout them. Video rarely goes according to plan all the time and you do have acontingency plan, correct?

Post-production

This is the most important part of any video production.(Sorry to keep repeating myself.) Post-production (post) takes the most hours.You won’t even get to this point unless you’ve done the first two parts well.Post is tough to figure. There are a few rules of thumb, however. I generallyplan about 10 hours of editing and working on things in After Effects, etc. forevery hour I spend in production. Your results may vary. However, if you’reshooting characters or talking heads and not scenes, you’ll probably be closerto three-to-five post-time hours per production hour. It all depends on howcreative you’re going to be or can be because of time constraints in post. Theminimum I recommend for budgeting post is a 6:1 ratio of post-production to production.If you know you’re going to do many things in post, then figure 10:1 and you’llbe safe. If you’re going to hire a post house to edit your work, you might wantto get them involved as early in the process as possible. If you’re shooting aproduction with actors over several days, deliver the video or the memory cardsto them every day. What you see at the end of the day happens in post, no twoways about it.

Conclusion (and an apology)

You might have noticed that I wrote that each section is themost important part of a video production. And indeed, they all are. You planyour video in pre-production; you shoot it during production, and bring it tolife in post-production. The only place you might be able to slide a bit is inpre-production. And then, only if you’re shooting in a studio with known talentand doing a talking head.

If you were thinking when you started this article thatyou’d be able to exactly cost out your video, I’m sorry to disabuse you of thatthought. There is no secret formula. There are no such things as exact costs.Every market has different prevailing prices for outside talent and everycompany has different ways of costing internally. With careful planning, usingyour unique costs, there is a way to get your production costs in line so the nexttime your boss asks you “How much?” you can give an educated estimate. P.S.: Itnever hurts to pad 10 percent or so into your costs. That can give you a leg upon the unforeseen and you know there will be things that pop up all the time.It’s the nature of making video.