Video Editor Pricing And The Footage Ratio

Per-minute pricing quotes $39.88 for $162.45 of work on a 2-minute video. That rate, set on a 30-minute job, recovers 25%: $17.91 an hour. Short videos are overhead jobs, not footage jobs.

Your floor rate, derived

A price copied from what others charge says nothing about your own costs.

This starts from what your year actually needs: $58,000 of take-home

income, $4,960 of overhead across the items listed, tax on

profit, and the share of your hours that are genuinely billable

(60% here, and the kit explains why not more).

That gives a floor of $72.96 an hour across 1,128 billable hours. Every step is printed so you can substitute your own

numbers — there is a blank worksheet for exactly that.

Finished length is not the job

A client asks for a 2-minute video. That tells you almost nothing: on a short edit 92% of the work is fixed overhead — ingest, sync, color, export, delivery — and the footage ratio moves it only 1.60x. On a 60-minute edit overhead is 27% and the ratio moves it 6.33x.

Short videos are overhead jobs. Long videos are footage jobs. Two different businesses, easily priced with one number.

Which is why per-finished-minute pricing is ruinous on short work. A rate set on a 30-minute job ($19.94/min) applied to a 2-minute job quotes $39.88 for $162.45 of work — 25% recovered, $17.91 an hour, against a $72.96 floor.

Includes footage ratios for six job types, the structure that prices the overhead separately so a cutdown and a documentary use the same arithmetic, and eight scripts for quoting before you have seen the footage. Plus a live Excel workbook — 25 formulas, every one verified by recalculation.

8 client scripts

Each one carries a line explaining why it is worded that way, because

a script you do not understand is one you will not send. Placeholders are in

[BRACKETS] so nothing goes out in someone else's words.

- Quoting before you have seen the footage

- The client who sends 90 minutes for a 2-minute video

- Pricing a short-form cutdown of an existing edit

- Revision round four on a finished edit

- Asking for the footage in a usable format

- The project that stalls waiting on client feedback

- Declining a job with no script and no brief

- Moving a one-off client onto a monthly volume rate

What this is not

These numbers are not a market price. They are arithmetic

about you — what your income target requires. They do not tell you what your

market will pay. If the number is far above what your market bears, that is real

information: something has to move, and quietly working below the floor is the

one option that cannot last.

These are scripts, not contracts, and nothing here is legal

or tax advice. No script threatens statutory interest, collections or legal

action — whether any of those is available to you depends on your contract and

jurisdiction. The 25% tax figure is a placeholder; ask your accountant for

yours.

Honest about the format

Printable PDFs plus an editable Excel workbook, not a physical product. One US Letter PDF (12 pages) and one A4 PDF (12 pages), and one .xlsx that opens in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice and Google Sheets. Files are available immediately after purchase; nothing ships.

Refunds

If this isn't what you expected, email me within 30 days and I'll refund you in full — no need to explain. Because it's an instant download I can't take the files back, so I'd rather you just had your money back.