We’ve all seen videos of experienced photographers paying tiny sums of money to have their photos edited via an online marketplace, but what happens when someone quotes you video editing services at a cost of just $2 for every minute of the final video?
Sven Pape of This Guy Edits is an experienced editor who has worked for James Cameron and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so you can’t imagine he was looking for someone to take on his editing work. However, his interest was piqued when a random offer to edit his YouTube videos popped into his inbox. The price quoted is alarmingly low, to the point that you could justifiably assume that the results are going to be quite poor. Surely, for this amount of money, the work is not going to be up to scratch.
Regardless of the quality of the resulting video, any editing process requires time, and the editor’s hourly rate when charging little more than $10 for a five-minute video will be incredibly low. In the comments to the video, an Indian editor noted that he gets paid $7 to edit an hour-long wedding video and, by comparison, the video edited for Pape is far simpler. South Asia has long been the home of some of the cheapest clipping path services on the planet, and it seems that the next step might be basic video editing for those who don't have enough time to put straightforward YouTube videos together.
Would you consider paying someone such low rates to cut together a short, simple video? Let us know in the comments below.
I would definitely try Eli out. I couldn’t do better. He might be living in a country where $20 is well worth his time. I know physicians in Cuba make $300 a week. Thailand you can eat like a kind for $10 baht. If he is here in the states then certainly could command a higher price. However, would I feel compelled to drop $30 for each video... no. At $15, it’s enough to say why not.. He likely has done his market research. $15 for 30 minutes worth of work isn’t too bad.
We really are part of a global economy.
That said the reason so many of us may be tempted to use overseas contractors ( I have) is that we are not pricing our work to be able to pay domestic pros their asking price.
Real estate photography is probably the best example where RE photographers are busting their hump shooting several houses a day at scandalously low prices. They have no option but to upload a boatload of JPGs to a Vietnamese or Filipino business to process and deliver the job for peanuts.
So long as we are afraid of asking the right price we will always be unable to pay our neighbors their fair price.
I recently stopped doing REP because of this. The rates kept dropping, the quality kept dropping, and realtors couldn't care less about a quality shoot. I live in Dallas and I'm now seeing shots for $79 (36 images including aerials), I'm now a Realtor.
In RE as an agent one always wants the high end deals. Fewer deals but bigger checks.
REP has a lot of niches. The volume market is a commodity market and thus shopped on price. I have been fortunate to have made a business in the ultra high end RE market (SoCal) where listings are $2million and up. They are willing to spend in these cases. However that market is not everywhere.
The real issue is we often wan the job so bad we quote stupid prices.
I don't do that any more and my revenue has jumped and the jobs and clients are better.
Who is “James Camera”?