Video Production Cost Calculator

Video budgets are built by phase because the cost drivers in each phase differ in kind. Pre-production consumes days from a small number of senior people - concept, script, storyboard, scouting, scheduling - and typically absorbs 10 to 20 percent of a budget. Production is the expensive phase per unit time because cost scales with crew headcount multiplied by shoot days: adding one crew member to a two-day shoot at 600 dollars per day adds 1,200 dollars, which is why a commercial crew of ten to twenty people makes a single overrun day very costly. Post-production splits into work priced by day (editing) and work priced by finished minute (motion graphics, colour grading, sound design), so a graphics-heavy two-minute piece can cost more per minute than a ten-minute interview edit. The 10 percent contingency is standard practice rather than padding. Weather, reshoots, extra revision rounds and equipment failure are common enough that omitting it makes a quote systematically low. Cost per finished minute is the benchmark clients most often compare on, but it is a weak comparator because it depends heavily on the shooting ratio - minutes captured per minute delivered - which can be about 5 to 1 for scripted corporate work and 50 to 1 or more for documentary. This model also excludes talent fees, location permits, production insurance, catering and travel, which commonly add another 10 to 30 percent to a real budget.

Structured production budgeting came out of the Hollywood studio system, where financing required a line-item breakdown before a picture was approved. That practice produced the enduring split between above-the-line costs - the creative principals such as writer, director, producers and lead talent, each negotiated individually - and below-the-line costs, meaning crew, equipment, stock and facilities priced against standard rates. The one-page summary of those categories, still called the top sheet, remains the format in which film and television budgets are presented today. Commercial and corporate production inherited the structure but needed a common bidding form so agencies could compare quotes from different production companies on equal terms. The Association of Independent Commercial Producers, formed in 1972 in the United States, developed a standardized bid form for that purpose, and the AICP form became the default vocabulary for commercial budgets, organized by pre-production, shoot and post with separate sections for crew, equipment and talent. Pricing motion graphics and colour grading per finished minute is a later convention from the post-production sector, which moved from film labs and linear tape suites to nonlinear editing and desktop colour tools across the 1990s and 2000s. That shift let finishing work be quoted as a unit of output rather than as booked suite hours, and it is why post line items in modern budgets mix day rates and per-minute rates.