Vourly rates at a glance:
- iPhone 4K filming: $100 per hour, 1 hour minimum
- Professional cinema cameras: $200 per hour, 2 hour minimum
- Editing: $75 per hour, billed separately from filming
- Add-ons per shoot: drone video $150, drone photos $125, professional lighting $150, second camera $150, photo add-on $250
- All raw footage included, plus one free revision round on your edited video
Video production cost per minute is the metric buyers reach for first and the one that survives contact with a real project worst. It is quoted everywhere because it is easy to compare, but a finished minute is an output measurement being used to price an input, and those two things come apart almost immediately. This is where the number comes from, when it is genuinely useful, and what to price instead.
Where the cost per minute number comes from
The figure is arrived at backwards. Someone totals a finished project, divides by the runtime of the delivered video, and reports the quotient. Do that across enough projects and you get the very wide published ranges you see quoted, from a few hundred dollars a minute to several thousand.
That range is not imprecision. It is the metric correctly reporting that the underlying projects had nothing in common. A minute of a one camera interview in a conference room and a minute of a three location brand film with drone, lighting, and a crew are both one minute.
Why a finished minute is not a unit of work
The relationship between runtime and effort is weak in both directions:
- Short can be expensive. A 45 second reel cut from 40 shots, with music sync, captions, and colour work, can take longer to edit than a 5 minute talking head.
- Long can be cheap. A 20 minute recorded panel with two cameras and light trimming is mostly capture, not craft.
- The shoot does not scale with runtime at all. You still travel to the site, set up, and light it whether the finished cut is 30 seconds or 6 minutes.
- Deleted footage still cost money. Most of what gets filmed never appears in the final cut, and per minute pricing quietly bills you for the survivors only.
What actually drives the bill: shoot hours and edit hours
Two numbers explain almost every video invoice. How many hours somebody was on site with a camera, and how many hours somebody sat in an edit. At Vourly both are published:
- Filming, iPhone 4K: $100 per hour, 1 hour minimum.
- Filming, professional cinema cameras: $200 per hour, 2 hour minimum.
- Editing: $75 per hour.
Editing time is reasonably predictable by the kind of video rather than by its length. A short social cut runs about 1.5 hours. A car, product, or detail piece runs about 2 hours. An interview or corporate piece runs about 3 hours per finished video.
Worked examples at real rates
Three projects, priced on hours, with the per minute figure calculated afterwards so you can see how unstable it is:
- Three social reels, iPhone tier. A 2 hour shoot at $200 plus about 3 hours of editing at $225 is $425. Total runtime is roughly 90 seconds, which reads as about $283 per minute.
- One corporate interview, professional tier. A 2 hour shoot at $400, lighting at $150, second camera at $150, and 3 hours of editing at $225 is $925. A 3 minute finished piece reads as about $308 per minute.
- A site film with aerials, professional tier. A 4 hour shoot at $800, drone video at $150, and 3 hours of editing at $225 is $1,175. A 2 minute cut reads as about $588 per minute.
The three per minute numbers span more than 2x while the underlying rate card never changed. That is the whole argument against the metric in one table.
If you are comparing vendors who quote in days rather than minutes, the same logic applies one level up, and videographer day rates breaks that unit down the same way.
The four things that actually change a quote
If runtime is the wrong variable, these are the right ones. Each maps to a line you can see:
- Number of locations. Every additional site adds travel, setup, and teardown before a single usable frame is captured. Two locations in a day is often more expensive than twice as much footage at one.
- Number of setups. A setup is a camera position with its own lighting and framing. Setups, not minutes, are what consume a shoot day.
- Number of finished deliverables. Editing is per video, not per minute of source. Four cuts from one interview costs roughly four times the editing of one cut.
- How much polish the edit needs. Captions, motion graphics, colour work, and music sync are all editing hours. A rough cut and a finished ad can share identical footage and differ by several hundred dollars.
Notice that none of those four is runtime, and all four are things a client can actually decide. That is why hours make a better negotiating unit: every lever is visible and you can trade one against another.
How to brief a project so it can be priced honestly
A vendor quoting per minute is often doing it because the brief did not contain enough to price properly. Five lines usually fix that:
- Where. How many locations, and are they in the metro or outside it.
- Who. How many people are on camera, and are any of them hard to schedule.
- What comes out. How many finished videos, and roughly how long each should be.
- Where it runs. Organic social, a website hero, or paid media. This decides the camera tier more than anything else.
- When. Any date that cannot move.
With those five, an hourly quote can be built exactly and you can see which line to cut if it comes back high. Without them, per minute is a guess that both sides can point at later.
When cost per minute is a fair way to compare quotes
It is defensible in exactly one situation: comparing two vendors on an identical, fully specified brief. Same locations, same shoot length, same number of setups, same deliverables. At that point runtime is held constant and the per minute figure is really just the total in disguise, which is fine.
What it cannot do is price a project that has not been scoped yet, and that is when people reach for it most.
Travel, tax, revisions, and what you keep
Local zone travel is included and out of zone travel is $1 per mile. Washington sales tax is added at 10.5%. Add-ons are flat per shoot: drone video $150, drone photos $125, professional lighting $150, second camera $150, photo add-on $250.
Every booking includes one free revision round on the edited video, with further editing at the same $75 per hour. All raw footage is included and yours to keep with full commercial rights, delivered through a secure client portal within 24 to 48 hours. If you want a second version later, you are not paying for the shoot again.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average cost of video production per minute?
Published figures range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per finished minute, which is so wide that it cannot price a real project. The spread exists because a minute of a static interview and a minute of a multi location brand film involve completely different amounts of work. Price the hours instead.
Why do agencies quote per minute at all?
It is a fast way to give a ballpark before scope exists, and it is easy for a client to compare at a glance. It stops being useful the moment the project has an actual shot list, because runtime and effort are only loosely related.
What does Vourly charge per minute?
Vourly does not price by runtime. Filming is $100 per hour on iPhone 4K or $200 per hour on professional cinema cameras, and editing is $75 per hour. A 60 second social cut usually needs about 1.5 hours of editing, so the finished minute costs roughly $113 to edit plus its share of the shoot.
Is a longer video always more expensive?
No, and this is the clearest sign the per minute metric is broken. A 5 minute edit assembled from one interview can take less editing time than a tightly cut 45 second reel that needs dozens of shots, music sync, and captions.