Hi,

I'm just starting out freelance editing from home and I've found that a lot of my time goes to organising my media files, encoding them to the correct format, rendering them in FCP7, then uploading it all to YouTube for the producer to see takes a lot of time and I don't know whether I should be charging the producer for this time. I've got hours of footage to encode and it's all in 1080i so it takes longer than SD to do anything.

The editing itself doesn't usually take that long, seeing as though I just move shots into the right place according to what the director has written.

Having said this though, the fact that I am at home rendering/encoding/uploading stops me from working at the supermarket because I have to oversee it and move it onto the next job once it's done, so therefore, should I be getting paid for it?

To tell you the truth, my computer is encoding now in the background...

Do I need to get a program that I can use that records all the rendering time FCP does so I can take off these minutes at the end of each fortnight so I'm not charging the producer for rendering time?

I don't know so I'd like to hear how it works out there in the industry.

I think you should charge time to organize but not uploadtime as during upload you are not working, just waiting for the upload to be finished or using that time to continue editing, maybe charge a fixed amount for having the video on a server, because you need to pay for hosting that should also be included. Not so sure about encoding to the correct format and rendering to fcp? Can't you edit in the native format and is this not a limitation of the NLE? In Edius I just handle everything natively and in realtime and rendering it out to a certain format is also very fast, in those cases I only charge the actual editing time.

Time is time, you should be charging something!
To me rendering time is like travel time.

To me rendering time is like travel time.

Yes, but how do you calculate this and what are fair rates? You can fly with an expensive private jet or a cheap charter airplane, both will get you there. Would you charge a client more because you use a slow single core pentium 4 to do your rendering or less because you have a 8 core machine? The first option is a cheap machine but would take a full day, the last one a very expensive one but would take an hour.

I don't charge for render or uploads. Generally I am on to the next task while that happens. I do have two edit systems though. The only exception is if it's a short render that needs to happen within the scope of editing. If its a ridiculously long render, I start it before info to bed. In that case I may add an hour to the project just for wear and tear.
Uploads don't require me to stop working so it's never an added charge.

The other thing is I rarely charge by the hour any more. Per project allows me to buffer in some extra money for the unexpected things that pop up. Just have to be really good at knowing how long a project will take and factor in your expertise to come up with a fair rate.

Yes. It's a different rate since I'm not personally involved in the process, but it's eating up kilowatt hours, tying up my network or a computer, and gradually wearing out video and computer components.

Even if the client has negotiated a flat rate instead of hourly, that time is figured in to that rate. It has to be.