A budget and a quote often live in the same spreadsheet, so they get mixed up. The budget is what the job costs you: crew days, rentals, licenses, edit hours.
The quote is what the client pays, which is that cost plus margin and tax, sold as a fixed price, a day rate or a retainer.
This post covers the budget. Rates, margin and pricing models are in how to price video production.
Most budgets get the shoot right, because the rental house sends a quote and the sound recordist has a day rate. The lines that go wrong are the ones nobody sends you a quote for, like the edit, the rounds of changes and the hours spent on calls.
Those numbers come from your own history or from a guess, and the guess usually comes in low.
In short
- The budget is what the job costs the studio, and the quote adds margin and tax on top.
- Cost in-house hours with a share of rent, software and gear, not the bare salary.
- Estimate edit and revision hours from the median of three to five similar jobs, with revision rounds on their own line.
- Keep contingency as one line at the bottom, sized from how far your last projects ran over.
- In the example, guessing post instead of measuring it leaves $825 out of a $7,700 budget.
The template
Copy the table into a spreadsheet. Quantity times unit cost gives the total, and the notes say where each number came from. When a job shows you a line was missing, add it.
| Line | Qty | Unit | Unit cost | Total | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-production | |||||
| Script or treatment | hour | Writer or producer | |||
| Producer prep | hour | Calls, scheduling, call sheet | |||
| Casting | item | Casting director, auditions | |||
| Location scouting | day | Travel and producer time | |||
| Permits | item | Leave at zero if none | |||
| Production | |||||
| Crew, one row per role | day | Director, camera, sound, gaffer | |||
| Equipment rental | day | Camera, lenses, lights, audio | |||
| Location fee | day | Include prep and wrap | |||
| Talent | day | Fee plus usage period | |||
| Travel | item | Fuel, parking, flights, hotel | |||
| Catering | person | Crew and client on set | |||
| Insurance | item | Gear and liability | |||
| Post-production | |||||
| Edit to first cut | hour | Median of past jobs | |||
| Revision rounds | round | Hours per round × rounds | |||
| Color | hour | ||||
| Sound mix | hour | ||||
| Music license | item | Check usage terms | |||
| Motion graphics | hour | Titles, lower thirds, end card | |||
| Subtitles | hour | Per language | |||
| Project management | hour | Calls, emails, uploads, approvals | |||
| Contingency | % | From your own overruns |
Filling in the columns
Use the unit the supplier bills in.
- Crew and rentals usually come by the day, so a half day goes in as a full day unless the contract says otherwise.
- Post-production goes in hours, because hours are what you’ll measure afterwards.
- Licenses, permits and insurance are items.
For people on your payroll, the unit cost is what an hour of their time costs the studio, with a share of rent, software and gear on top of the salary. If you use the bare salary, in-house work looks cheaper than a freelancer when it often isn’t.
For freelancers and rentals, use the quote you received and put its date in the notes, because a six-month-old quote may not hold.
The notes column pays off on the next job. “Median of four brand videos, Feb to Jun” tells whoever reads the budget how far to trust a number. “Guess” is a fair note too, as long as somebody wrote it down.
Where budgets go wrong: post and revision hours
The shoot gets budgeted from supplier quotes, while the edit gets budgeted from memory, usually the memory of the job that went smoothly. Revision rounds get whatever is left, often a line called “adjustments” with an evening’s worth of hours in it.
Take the last three to five projects that look like the new one (same kind of video and similar length, ideally for the same client) and pull the hours for each stage. Use the median.
An average lets one cursed project inflate every estimate, and the best job of the lot makes everything look shorter than it is.
Give the revision rounds their own line, counted in rounds. Work out how long one round takes your team on this kind of video and multiply by the rounds in the proposal.
The budget now matches what you promised the client, and when they ask for a fourth round you already know what it costs. Keeping that count down is the subject of how to stop endless revision rounds.
Project management is the other blind spot. Calls about notes and chasing an approval never show up on a supplier’s invoice, and they add up to hours on every job. Measure them the same way you measure the edit.
Contingency, sized from your own overruns
Contingency pays for what goes wrong inside the agreed scope, like a camera that dies on the morning of the shoot or an interviewee who turns up two hours late and pushes the crew into overtime.
A new script from the client is a change of scope, and it gets a new estimate.
Keep contingency as one line at the bottom. If every line carries a quiet extra 10%, nobody can tell afterwards whether the estimates were right, and the padding gets spent without anyone deciding to spend it.
To size it, compare budget and actual cost on your last projects. If they finished between 5% and 12% over, about 10% covers most of them.
If one ran 40% over, find the line that did it before you raise the percentage. It’s usually post, and the fix belongs in that line.
A filled example
A two-minute brand video: one shoot day at the client’s office, two people from the studio on set, a freelance sound recordist, two revision rounds included.
In-house time is costed at $75 an hour, the studio’s cost per hour from the pricing post, so a 10-hour shoot day is $750. Post and management hours are medians from three similar jobs.
Every figure is made up to show the arithmetic and none of them is a market rate.
| Line | Qty | Unit | Unit cost | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Script | 8 | hour | $75 | $600 |
| Producer prep | 6 | hour | $75 | $450 |
| Permits (client’s office) | 0 | item | $0 | $0 |
| Studio crew on set | 2 | day | $750 | $1,500 |
| Sound recordist | 1 | day | $500 | $500 |
| Camera and lighting rental | 1 | day | $400 | $400 |
| Travel and parking | 1 | item | $100 | $100 |
| Catering | 5 | person | $20 | $100 |
| Insurance | 1 | item | $100 | $100 |
| Edit to first cut | 16 | hour | $75 | $1,200 |
| Revision rounds (4 hours each) | 2 | round | $300 | $600 |
| Color | 3 | hour | $75 | $225 |
| Sound mix | 3 | hour | $75 | $225 |
| Music license | 1 | item | $100 | $100 |
| Motion graphics | 4 | hour | $75 | $300 |
| Subtitles | 2 | hour | $75 | $150 |
| Project management | 6 | hour | $75 | $450 |
| Subtotal | $7,000 | |||
| Contingency | 10 | % | $700 | |
| Total cost | $7,700 |
The job costs the studio $7,700, and the price gets built on top of that.
Now run the same job with post guessed instead of measured: 10 hours for the edit and one evening, 3 hours, for “adjustments”. That’s 11 hours under the medians, $825 missing from the budget.
The $700 contingency wouldn’t cover the gap, and anything that went wrong on the shoot would come out of the margin.
Getting the hours from RecReview
RecReview doesn’t hold rates, costs or budgets, so the spreadsheet stays yours. It gives you the hours, logged while the work happens.
The timer runs on a task or a video. Each person has one running at a time, so starting a new one stops the last. Every session on a task records the phase the task was in, such as pre-production, production or post-production.
Owners and admins see the totals in Metrics. Narrow it to a client or a project, pick a period, and a chart groups the hours by client, project, phase or person.
Another view shows the average hours per video, the post-production hours per video and the hours spent against the estimate, where 100% means on target.
A separate list ranks the videos that drew the most comments and shows how many versions each one went through, a rough guide to how many rounds a client’s jobs take.
Each task can carry an estimate, with how much of it is used. The bar turns amber past 80% and red once the task runs over.
When you set an estimate, RecReview suggests one from the median hours logged on other tasks in the same project. The time tracking and analytics pages have more.
