Pricing Video: When Estimating, Don’t Forget Client Reviews and Output
[by Jay Kinghorn]
When estimating an upcoming video or multimedia job, it’s easy to neglect estimating the time necessary for client reviews and encoding your video files for output. These two areas alone can quickly eat through your profit margins .
Here are a few tips to make sure you’re accurately estimating these aspects of your video jobs.
- Specify the number of rounds of client review in your estimate and contract. Be sure to also include notice of charges the client will incur should they exceed this allowance.
- Communicate with your clients that all the project’s stakeholders need to sign off on each round of the video. Make it clear that you cannot incorporate their corrections until you have everyone on board. Explain to them that this saves them money, because it decreases the risk of them incurring additional costs because of late changes.
- In your project discussions, be sure to address the technical specifications you will use when preparing your video files for client delivery. This helps reduce the risk of confusion between you and the client and allows you to add the costs of preparing multiple iterations of the video file to the initial estimate rather than surprising your clients with additional fees when they ask for additional files.
- Take the time to become familiar with the nuances of video encoding. Like preparing a still image for CMYK reproduction, there are technical and aesthetic issues you need to be able to address to get the best quality output. The night before the project is due is not the time to begin experimenting with the compression settings in your video-editing software.
Jay Kinghorn is president of Kinghorn Visual Inc., which specializes in helping small-to-medium-sized businesses spread their stories through Web video.
