What Should a Demo Reel Cost?

"Hi. It's Craig Scime from Clearstarmedia.com speaking today for Expert Village and we're learning about demo reels. I've been talking to you about how to find a good demo reel editor. The person who does the magic with the computer and that edits your reel and makes it look really exciting for somebody to watch and while showcasing your ability. But what do you want to pay? How much should it cost? That's a very good question and one that I'm going to answer for you right now. Demo reels, the price to pay, it could be charged either hourly or about the time of work. So for example, somebody may charge you "x" amount of money for just to come in and do your reel and they'll say, "anything under five minutes is going to cost this much". Or they might say, "If your reel is one minute it costs this amount, two minutes is this amount, three minutes is this amount". And that would be your finished minute price. So every minute, they're telling you how much it would cost. The other way and the way that we like to charge are hourly. Now of course you could come into an editor's work area and not know how much it's going to cost. Well a good editor should give you an idea based on your footage, and the amount of work it's going to take. But it could take anywhere from two to six hours. And if they're charging hourly, you want to make sure you're doing what you can to make sure that you're saving that money. And how can you save money if you're doing things hourly? Well first off, know your footage. It is so important that you know what clips you want to use. If you come here, give me a VHS tape, which VHS's you know I've got to rewind and fast forward, and you don't have it cued up right to the scene that you want to showcase, well it's going to take me time and waste your money for me to find that scene. And a matter of fact, it's even worse if you don't know what scene it is. So you've got to do your homework. You've got to know what scene you want and know where it is on that tape. Even better, cue it up. On a DVD it's so much easier, of course. It doesn't take that long, but you've got to know how many minutes it is that you want to, how many minutes into the DVD, should I say, that you're clip that you want for us to digitize is. And same thing with any other tape or whatever it is you bring. Really know your footage. So it may not be a bad idea to write down in a notebook what clips you want. Even try to put an order to the clips. Say, "I think I want to try this clip first or this clip second" and see how that works. And then once you put it in on the time line, you'll really be able to see if that's working. Remember, it is very, very important to put your best work first. A manager or agent is very, very busy and they may not take the entire time to watch your entire DVD or web video. So you want to definitely put your best work forward. In the next clip, we're going to be talking more about demo reels and I'll tell you some tips on how you should receive your format of your demo reel. Do you want it to be on a DVD or do you want it to be a web file? Stick around. I'll tell you what you should do."