There is no honest rate card for video editing, because two films with the same runtime can be entirely different amounts of work. What a serious studio does instead is quote each project against six drivers — and once you know them, you can predict where your own quote will land before you ever get on a call.
What moves the number
Footage volume. An editor's first job is watching. Two hours of rushes and twenty hours of rushes are different projects even if the final film is ninety seconds in both cases — a multi-day event shot on three cameras costs more to cut than a single-location interview, before any creative decision is made.
Edit complexity. A talking-head with b-roll is assembly; a narrative brand film is writing with footage. The more the structure has to be found in the material rather than planned before it, the more edit rounds the film needs.
The grade. Colour correction — matching shots, fixing exposure, holding skin tones — is included in any serious edit. A look, built in DaVinci and reviewed on a calibrated display, is its own line. It is also, frame for frame, the biggest visible difference between a film that feels expensive and one that does not.
Sound. Cleaned dialogue, a licensed track, a real mix. Audiences forgive soft focus; they never forgive bad audio — and sound is the half of post most often cut from a budget and most regretted afterwards.
Motion graphics. Titles and lower thirds are standard. Animated diagrams, logo builds and data visualisation are designed, not applied — they price like design work because they are design work.
Revision rounds. The quiet budget-killer. Two consolidated feedback rounds are typical; per-stakeholder drip feedback can double an edit. One person collecting all notes into one document is worth real money.
Post-only projects
You do not need to have shot with a studio for it to finish your film. We take post-only projects — footage from any camera, another crew's rushes, an archive — and run the same pipeline: edit, grade, sound, conform. If you already have material sitting on a drive, the cost conversation starts at the edit, not the shoot.
Where cutting budget backfires
Skipping the grade shows in every frame. Skipping the mix shows in every second. Cutting revision structure — going cheap on project management — usually costs more than either, because an edit that drifts through six rounds of scattered feedback burns the hours a look and a mix would have taken. If the budget is genuinely tight, cut scope: a shorter film finished properly beats a longer one abandoned at the rough cut.
Getting your number
A useful quote needs four facts: what the footage is (or what the shoot is), what the film must achieve, where it will run, and when it is needed. Bring those and the number arrives in one conversation, not a week of back-and-forth — send us the four facts and you will have a reply within 4 working hours. If you want the fuller picture of what you are buying first, what post-production actually includes walks the whole pipeline.