Do you charge for rendering?
 

i made a video for a client with multiply effects and layers and everything that would take the comp to render. so it took 6 hours to render and that meant 6 hours of me not able to use my computer.

my question is does anyone charge for rendering? and if so at what rate and how does the client know this? is there anyway to prove this?

Thanks for you time and if you have any questions just ask. thanks again!

That's why we have evening and sleeping time! :)

yeah good point. i render overnight and i also render during the day. do you think its a bad idea to charge? i havent done yet.

I have no problem charging for rendering time, just do it at a lesser rate. It has been posted here before.

Perfectly reasonable to charge for rendering time. Your computer is on during render and has wear and tear just like any other piece of equipment. Hard drives DO wear and break down with use.

Esp. OK if one has to have a second (or third, or fourth, or cluster) to render so that another machine is free for editing or related work.

how much of a lesser rate? 25% less?

generally not. thats why you have more than one machine, work on one, render on the other. these days though, with multi CPU machines, some apps will let you either
1. turn off multi-proc rendering and just use one proc, you work with the other procs in the FG app while the other renders in the background. AE works well like this. I run two copies of AE on the same machine, render in one, work in the other and you barely notice the speed difference.

2. directly manage how many CPU's are used .

3. learn to optimize your renders

or you just use another machine or learn to manage your render times better including doing whatever you can to make the renders themselves faster by pre-rendering where ever possible. I took some one's pig AE proc that took 4+ hrs to render, pre-rendered a couple of layers that were "done", not to be changed, and where the cause of the long renders. using the pre-rendered movs instead brought the new total render time done to 40 minutes.


Steve Oakley

Thanks
 

Thanks for that steve. im working on one machine with one proc at the min and hoping to upgrade as soon as possible. also im hoping to make the move to mac i think. its on the cards but i'll have t see.

Also thanks for the tips and about pre renders. ive never tried them before and will give them a go as soon as i have the chance. i just rendered a 1 min 3d space sequence and it came to a total of 9hrs 47min.

also what do you think of the spec of my machine? i know it could be better and im upgrading to 2gb of ram in about 3 weeks.

dell 5150 dimension
1gb ram
x700 ATI graphics card

that the important stuff really. but anything for a new computer really. just one more question. how do you run AE twice? i take it is the same Hdd and Os? thanks!

Steve, I would suggest that if you have two machines so that you can dedicate one to rendering, than you absolutely should be charging for it. How else does the render machine pay for itself? As menitioned in an earlier post, there is a finite life to any piece of hardware and rendering tends to tax the system pretty well so temperatures are up, drives are spinning and your gear is depreciating. Our company charges for rendering time but at about half the rate for editing since it is happening without any required operator interface.

Also how would and do you prove rendering if asked by a client? what would you do? thanks.

Liam, I've never had to "prove" rendering. Nor have I had to prove editing hours. I would hope that the relationship with the client would be trusting enough that you didn't have to prove how many hours you spent on each task involved. If a client really questioned it, I guess I'd just set it up to render again and let him sit there for 9 hrs watching the clock! Of course, he'd have to pay for the second render too!!

thanks for that Rob. ive never mentioned the render before. and also it should be fine with my clients. and let them sit for 9 hours. that would be pretty funny!

Thanks.