Delivering Footage
 

Hey guys,

I have a client who I gave the raw footage from a shoot too. Later they asked me to mail a copy of the footage to a different department in another state. They then recently asked me to mail another copy to another department.

What do you charge for mailing a USB stick overnight and regular mail?

It's quite a bit of footage so it's difficult to email it all.

Thanks!

Re: Delivering Footage
 

Good clients with a long track record of working with me (which is most of my folks), I bill $25 for the thumb drive/SD card (which covers my costs, I probably don't make more than about $3 here), use their UPS/FedEx acc't number, and I eat the man hours. I keep a few thumb drives on hand (I order them 10 at a time from Amazon), if I need something bigger I use same-day Amazon prime. (Obviously if it's more than $25 I bill for it.) It's mostly cost neutral, I don't concern myself with the 10 minutes it takes to make the copy nor the 10-15 minutes it takes to dig up a box and drive it to the UPS pickup.

New clients or one-off clients (it's the one-offs who mostly do this), I really strive to figure it out before the shoot and then deal with it at the shoot. Hand the SD card to the client/producer and then I'm done with it forever. This is particularly powerful in your situation where you am the keeper of the card, and for the third time you're mailing off a copy, and there's no edit money in it for you at all. I feel like delivering the footage to the client (generally by handing it to them, but if need be, by mailing it to them) should be part of my dayrate, but after the third time I am either your editor, at which point I need to bill for editing time, or your b-tch, and I don't want to be that.

Re: Delivering Footage
 

Thanks for the info!

Yeah it's the third time, and it cost me $22 for shipping at fed ex (no client account unfortunately ) plus flash drive, driving 15 minutes each way, and I am editing a little bit for them but they also have another company (where I sent it) editing for them. Hard to know what to charge. $25 doesn't even cover the postage and usb drive, not to mention my time. It is a regular client though that I would like to have satisfied if possible and not feel ripped off.

Re: Delivering Footage
 

$75 - 100 job for me. Usually I try to just add it to the next invoice.

These days, however, I tend to send a link to the footage from Dropbox. Most people have a decent download speed. Or, if it's a LOT of footage, 20GB+ I'll send them a link to download from my QNAP NAS system. Then I don't have to spend any time on it.

Re: Delivering Footage
 

I never ever do anything where my hard costs aren't covered. Gear rental, shipping, handing off media cards, etc. So at the very minimum, bill for your hard costs.

Get a ups account and a fedex account. I use ups. I am a part of a professional group that gets me 25% off base rate. (PRSA? I can't remember.) Buy a scale. Order a box of a gross of padded mailers. Get a 10-pack of thumb drives. Ask UPS for a free 100 waybill clear stickey holder things. You are now running a UPS store at home.

Copy footage to USB drive. Put in envelope. Weigh. Print waybill. There is a UPS dropbox waaay closer to you than 15 minutes. Find it on their website. Drop it and be done.

For another $5 UPS will send a truck to you to pick it up. That's fine too. Back-bill it.

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Re: Delivering Footage
 

Nate, how do you itemize that $75-100 or do you just call it delivery price?

Mike, yeah I have a post office right near me that does overnight cheaper but my client wanted to try Fed Ex because they thought it was cheaper. Unfortunately it was more. And more of my ti me!

I have a UPS account and thats a great idea!

Re: Delivering Footage
 

I would bill it as a half-hour of my time plus fees for shipping and cost of the flash drive. The other way to do it is just say "ok, that would be a $100 fee." Makes it easy for people to understand the true cost of their request.

Re: Delivering Footage
 

Sounds good to me. Some clients are pretty cheap though LOL. But definitely gets the point across that the client is paying for your time

Re: Delivering Footage
 

When I bill it, I bill it as one hour of editing ($90) plus expenses. I don't do editing by fractions of an hour, so it's an hour minimum.

I like that better than a $100 flat fee. I don't like the client thinking that I'm charging $100 to send them a $10 thumb drive. Feels like gouging to me. The $10 hard cost and the $90 for editing feels better to me, even though it nets the same hundred bucks.