Fair price for sound post

NoiseNinja

NoiseNinja

Hello All,

I have been doing professional sound work for many years. I started doing post sound with a local group of filmmakers about 4 years ago as a hobby. Over those years I have done a lot of work but never charged for my services. I have become proficient at dialog editing, noise reduction, ADR, sound design and mixing. One of the directors I have been working with is now employed at a company making promotional videos and doing short films. They are also planning a feature film. They have asked me to bid on some work for hire. My question is what is a fair price for post production audio? How do you base your price? Like day rate, hourly rate, or based on finished run time? This customer recently sent me a project to do noise reduction on. I did the worst couple of clips and they were happy with my results so now it is time for me to have a meeting to discuss workflow and payment. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Figure out your overhead and add a fair hourly rate for yourself. And research your local market. Where do you fit in? What's "fair and competitive" in the NY-TriState area - which even here varies wildly between Manhattan and the "suburbs" - has no bearing on the Las Vegas market.
 
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No idea if this is interesting for you but as a buyer (albeit very intermittently), what I look for are 3 different prices:

1. Price if I do most of the sound work
2. Price for #1 plus some foley
3. Price for #2 plus a couple of rocking sound tricks

We have a workflow system where dialogue, production sound, foley and music (Mike McGuill) are inserted by me and then I give it to a sound pro. For a basic job on a 10-minute short, it takes him a day which he bills me at £200 per day and does a great job (he has feature films under his belt). Last film fest, the sound stood up really well and he did a great job.

He asks for a certain workflow with one specific 'trick' which means he can quickly / easily resolve the issues.

I gave him someone else's short and he billed more / took longer because they lacked an easy workflow.
 
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The way I work is like this: I find out as many details as I can about the project and what they require. I then tell them my rate is $## per hour. I tell them I expect the job will take X number of hours and it will be at that rate, but that if however, I find it is going to take longer because of factors that were not clear when they detailed the work in which case it may take a bit longer. I give them a basic quote based on the expected hours, and a maximum it could be if all is not as straight forward as it appears based on various factors ( which I explain to them). That way they don't get any unpleasant surprises, but I get paid for most if not all the hours put into it and at a decent rate. I try not to box myself into a position of spending lots of free hours because of under quoting.
 
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