That is alot like asking, "How much does a car cost?" There are many factors. The usual figure given in the industry is $500 to $5,000 per finished minute for quality productions.
Here are some factors that contribute to the price of video
- Professional On Screen Talent: Will increase the price of your video. A cheaper alternative is to use a voiceover.
- Amateur On Screen talent will severly increase the price of video. This usually happens when a business owner would like to be the face of the video, but doesn't have any experience being on screen. Professionals make the video job look easy. Amateurs take longer to get through a shoot costing more time for editing and on set crew.
- Animation: Another high cost item. As traditional video becomes easier to work with bigger companies are spending more money on animation. It takes a designer longer to craft a small scene than if humans were to perform the same element. Commercials from Gatorade, Verizon and AT&T all use a lot of animation that actually cost them a great deal of money. It typical that a quick 5-second animation clip could cost $5,000 to $10,000. Imagine if you put in several for a full 30-seconds. It could easily cost you over $100K. However, in those cases if the commercial can bring you an additional $2M-$5M in sales. What's $100k?
- Length of the Video: For every minute shot it could take at least 5-30 minutes of editing time. In some cases with a lot of elements, it could take several 8hr days to edit a 5 minute clip. Full length movies (1.5hrs) take almost a year to edit.
- Unscripted Video: This can swing either way. An interview between two people on a certain subject can be a simple video - IF there are no human errors. On the other hand, if the two are not comfortable with the setup or prepped on the subject, it could result in a great deal of editing time.
- Number of Cameras: Once you add a second camera the editing time for the project actually triples. It sounds wierd, but it causes the editor to do extra work to get the two cameras to sync up. In broadcast video which the public is use to, they make it look very simple. It almost goes unnoticed how good they are with multi-camera shoots. They use a very expensive control room and other very expensive equipment to keep all video in sync. For recorded session in a smaller studio that equipment doesn't usually exist.
