Survey on Hiring Documentary Film Editors

I am interested in conducting an informal survey on the fee structure for hiring an editor to cut a documentary film. This isn’t about rates per se. Given our changing economic landscape, I’m curious to know if other documentary editors and producers are charging/paying for editing services by the hour (or day or week) or by the job?

Every editor I personally know charges by the hour, day or week–in other words, for a set increment of time. However, I have met producers who expect to pay a set amount to get an editing job done. (Usually they are not seasoned documentary filmmakers.)  From the producer’s point of view, they want to know that their post-production budget will not spiral out of control. From the documentary editor’s point of view, they want to know that the producer/director will not continue asking for changes to their documentary, racking up time and exploiting the editor.

These days, I am very clear in my documentary editing and story consulting contracts that our services are rendered on an hourly basis. This seems to work well for most of my documentary clients. I have learned my lesson about clarity the hard way. I had a client who thought she was getting a 20-minute cut edited for $2,000. It turned out that she didn’t have the script that she said she did, and editing took much longer. Lesson learned.

It has also been helpful to create separate contracts for each stage of editing a long form documentary film editing:

• Assembly cut
• Rough cut
• Fine cut
• Locked picture

So …what do other people think? Charge for documentary film editing by the hour? Or by the ” job “?