HDV editing rates
 

I freelance edit for a few companies and some of them are starting to make a move to HDV and burn it to Blu-Ray. Usually 4-5 hours worth of footage shot with one camera. Currently, everything is SD. As a freelance editor, how much extra would you charge to edit and deliver in HD?

Thanks
-Jim

Would have to deliver on Bluray and SD DVD as well. The downcovert process takes a long time.

What editor do you use? How do you plan to distribute bluray?

I personally charge between $500 and $1000 extra for HD or HDV depending on the package. Editing HDV isn't the same as DV, period. Time is money and there is a considerable amount of extra time editing HDV and delivering Bluray.

Premiere Pro to Encore to Blueray takes the following time for me.

1hr 55min Footage from Premiere(all color correction and effects pre rendered) about 2hrs 20min to export to Encore. In encore it takes me about 45min to 1hr to build dvd, chapters, menus. Then it takes about 1.5 hours to make a Bluray ISO. The bluray burn process at 2x takes about 2hrs for 1 Bluray.

5 Hours to build the bluray ISO plus burn time.
compared to

1hr 15min for 1hr 55min of DV, 30 minutes to build menus, chapters and 15 minutes to make ISO. Totaling 2 hours for SD DVD. The burn time is like 6 minutes.

So, yes I would charge more. BTW Newegg has the LG 6x bluray burner for $280, wow the price as dropped.

Re
 

I understand all of the extra work that goes in to delivering Blu-Ray and I know that most companies charge a lot extra but I was wondering how much of that actually gets passed on to their editors. I was asked by a company today how much I would charge to deliver in HD...and I was thinking about 500 more than a normal SD project but I was wondering how realistic that was.

I acutally use Vegas and am hoping they come out with a Blu-Ray authoring solution really soon. If not, I'll probably temporarily use MovieFactory.