How to charge photo slideshow production ?

<p>I did a lot slideshow for wedding, birthday and new born babies for friends with no charge. Recently, my friend's employer asks me how much to make a 5-10 minutes of slideshow DVD for their office anniversary. If my charge is fair, he can refer more his clients to me. Now my questions are :<br>

1) If all picture come to me in digital format, how much to charge for a 5-10 minutes slideshow in DVD output ? <br>

2) If I need to scan from printed photo, how much to charge for each manual scanning ? <br>

Since I work at home, my time is the cost to concern. I would like to know the fair charges to my potential customers. <br>

Many thanks.</p>

<p>How much have you charged for the Wedding, Birthday and new born babies slideshow? <br /> Charge what you charge for these other slideshows.<br /> Scanning a photograph today is like a .29 cent a scan so there is your base price for scanning.<br>

I would ask yourself this, if the price is right the company would refer me to other companies. OK that's great,<br>

On the other hand, you don't want to compromise your pricing on IF's.<br>

When someone tells me they have 100 photographs to scan how much would I charge I say 50 bucks.</p>

<p>You can charge by your time, or by the 'output' time.</p>

<p>As Duane points out there is a base price for scanning, so double that as a charge to your customer, and put the job out to a scanning company.</p>

<p>And on top of that is production time - for a 5-10 minute piece (thats one being 50% more work than the other!) charge - for example - $50 per minute. So $250 to $500.</p>

<p>In my opinion its better to price for the DVD run time the client wants - because they understand that, They wont necessarily understand why you need x hours to do something - if they understood the technology they'd do it themselves. And the good thing about pricing per DVD minute is that if you get a big job, say a 15-20 minute show, the pricing has risen appropriately, so no surprises for the client - they'd know that at the outset.</p>

<p>These things take time to do right so DONT undersell yourself.</p>

<p>No I didn't charge my friends in Slideshow as I mentioned before. It's my friend's boss asked for a quote.<br>

I wish I can charge $250 to $500 for 5-10 minutes slide show output to DVD, but it'll never happen. The boss won't pay this amount for a 5-10 minutes slide show eventhough I will need 60-90 minutes to organize and burn to DVD. I don't expect the sanning cost is so cheap. Does it including fine tuning or adjustment after scanned to jpeg format ? </p>

 

<p>The prices I quoted were an example. If you decide to charge $10 a minute, fine, the point is that for five minutes its $50, and ten minutes $100. Easy maths for a client. The alternative is a ramble from you about a load of techy stuff they dont care about and which just confuses.</p>

<p>However dont underprice your time. Wherever you live find out what a mechanic charges for an hour of his/her time, or a carpenter, or a painter, or engineer, or an architect. And work out your hourly rate based on a price somewhere in there.</p>

<p>If you ARE going to get more work off the back of this (is this really likely?) then you want to be earning a realistic fee for this. The alternative is that you do this a 'a favour' for peanuts and then they all expect you do it for peanuts as well, and when you dont they huff and leave. Or you do it and make a huge loss.</p>

<p>In my opinion its wiser to earn on a 'sure' job than speculate on a bigger income from all the other 'maybe' jobs that might never appear.</p>

<p>Bear in mind this is not bein done for your friend, this is for your friend's friend. The least you should be earning is equivalent to the hourly rate your friend receives.</p>

<p>I do commercial slide shows, and they take time, skill and expensive equipment, and that all needs paying for.</p>

<p>We do several slideshows a year @ weddings (so consumer oriented slideshows). From me, I have found that charging a base rate plus an extra cost per image, has worked well. For us, we charge $149 base rate. That is essentially, what I want to make it worth my effort. We then charge $1/image and this includes scanning as needed, but scanned images are NOT edited (editing would definitely be more). In terms of scanning, Photoshop Elements has a great feature where it will divide scanned photos (perhaps other programs have this as well?). So I can load 3 or more images on the scanner at a time and have Elements automatically divide them. Once organized in the right order, I simply drop them in a timeline, keyframe some motion that is copied onto all the slides, add the audio bed and output to DVD. I do NOT keyframe each individual slide. Or rather, not for the price outlined above.</p>