[MacDV] Re: Slideshow DVD Pricing--MacDV Digest, Vol 19, Issue 2

[Ted Langdell]

Ted Langdell
Ted Langdell Creative Broadcast Services
Marysville, CA
Main:  	(530) 741-1212

I do quite a few of these every year.  They can be fun to do, create a 
lot of smiles, and become a signature product for a video production 
business.

If you're planning on doing this for money, you need to break out the 
various work segments and make sure you don't feel like you're 
short-changing yourself in the process... or actually ARE spending more 
than you're receiving.

The hard costs add up, and creating the package can be rather time 
consuming depending on the number of pictures involved.

Are you:

Scanning

Cleaning up (in photoshop, say to take out red eye, clean up specks and 
lines, other defects in the print)

Dropping the cleaned up pictures into a timeline

Adding motion and transitions

Adding music

Making the pictures work with the music and vice versa (may require 
editing music to make things end at the end of a picture sequence or 
adjusting the timing of picture changes to match music flow)

Adding titles as appropriate

Outputting file for DVD

Authoring DVD in iDVD or DVDSP

Making copies  (figure in copy time and hard costs of DVD's, printing 
labels on the disk (design and printing time and ink), creating and 
printing case inserts (high gloss photo paper and ink, trimming paper 
to fit) and providing cases.)

I'd suggest you time how long it takes to do each of: Scan ten 
pictures... clean them up, drop them into a timeline with transitions 
and add motion.

Use the results to calculate the average number of pictures you can do 
in an hour and then use what you think your time is worth to come up 
with a cost per work element.

If it takes you (on average) three minutes to scan a picture (and I use 
a scanner setting of 300 DPI at a finished print size of 6" in the 
longest dimension to a .tiff or photoshop file (no compression) so that 
I end up with enough pixels to go from a group shot to a single face 
with no artifacts or pixellation).

It might take you another three minutes (on average) to clean up a 
picture as outlined above... so you could figure six minutes per 
picture just to get it ready to go into a timeline.

That means you could do ten pictures an hour.  Divide your hourly worth 
by ten and that's your cost per picture to scan.  Your hourly capacity 
is dependent on your harware, software and skill.  Some pictures may 
require little or no cleanup. Some may require a whole lot.  It may 
tend do average out over a project.

Use a similar method to cost-out the other parts of the process.

Mark up the price of the items you pay cash for to cover the getting 
and keeping on hand of DVD's, paper, ink, DVD cases, etc.

You'll soon see why some of us charge thousands to do a well-crafted 
project of several hundred images.

Even if you give your time away on family member's projects, do recoup 
your hard costs so you don't go into the hole.

Hope this is helpful.

Ted.

On Feb 5, 2006, at 6:53 AM, 
macdv-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com wrote:

> Message: 5
> Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2006 12:40:41 -0500
> From: James Asherman <jimash at optonline.net>
> Subject: Re: [MacDV] Slideshow DVD Pricing
> To: "A place to discuss digital video on Macintosh."
> 	<macdv at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
> Message-ID: <B801AD0F-4B63-416A-BC65-3BB80A53ABC5 at optonline.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
> On Feb 4, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Don Stark wrote:
>
>> My research on this shows pricing ranges from a couple hundred
>> dollars to a couple of thousand.  Depends on the complexity,
>> features, length, etc.
>
>
> Start at $3.00 per picture.
> Discretionary ( as the market will bear) fees for effects, text,
> music, copies etc.