The Pay Transparency Project

I recently discovered the Pay Transparency Project, thanks to a recent Doculink post. If you scroll down this remarkable database for motion picture gigs, you’ll see that editing fees in the “Documentary Features, Independent” category range from about $3000-$5000 per week. (Our rates are competitive.)

At that rate, the key budget question is, “How long will it take to edit my documentary?”

Today it takes about 36 weeks (9 months) to edit a 90-minute documentary. That calculation comes from data provided by The Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE).

“A good rule of thumb for scheduling is one month of editing per ten minutes of finished content,” says the ADE. For our example, let’s multiply 36 weeks at, say, $4000 per week. That calculates to $144,000 in editing fees.

When I shared these figures on a recent webinar called Saving Money While Editing, my host Carole Dean asked, “Is it possible that the Alliance is giving out inflated figures?”

“No,” I said. “Let me be clear: I agree 100% with The Alliance of Documentary Editors and their metrics.” See my blog “Documentary Editing Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint.”

That said, a lot of indie filmmakers don’t have those funds for editing!

To solve this pervasive problem, we’ve figured out how to edit a feature documentary in ten weeks, yes 10 weeks, provided you do a few things in advance. For one, our Accelerated Post approach depends on directors culling some of their footage.

Sound daunting? Learn shortcuts for culling footage in my 16-minute Tutorial: Log Footage Quickly.