What would you charge in terms of costs?

Help and Troubleshooting
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Hello fellow Keyshooters,

One of my clients needs 2 flat-lay product rendering shots until mid of November and I would be interested to know how you usually calculate a quote for this?

  • What are your cost factors?
  • Are DPI and resolution relevant?
  • Flat-rate or on an hourly basis?
  • What increases or decreases the price for you?
  • Are revisions already included or do you charge extra for them?

The 2 renderings for my client are billboard size - would that increase your price?

Looking forward to your answers!
Thanks a lot!

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  • Complexity of model; complexity of materials used; complexity of light setup; complexity of animation (if needed); all other;
  • Only if it require rendering time longer as hour or two;
  • prefer flat rates, but it’s matter of personal preferences;
  • factors mentioned above, also additional sub-tasks like CAD model editing and rendering post-processing;
  • depend on what kind of revisions - almost never bill simple changes like switching some parts of model visibility or material replacing, but can ask for some extra if some kind of deeper editing required or re-rendering model take a long time due to size, etc.
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  • Same as Oleksii
  • I base my flat-rate on hours so render time is a part of that. DPI doesn’t make a difference, resolution does.
  • Also flat-rate but I always communicated very clearly the amounts of author-corrections included. Most of the time 1 but you can also exclude them completely.
  • As point one, complexity and I know some also look at the clients’ size of company but think that’s more common in the USA than here, at least in The Netherlands.
  • The reason for me to mention the number of revisions included was mainly for clients start to think in an early stage instead. I don’t like doing the same stuff over and over again and some clients tend to start thinking if they see their briefing wasn’t exactly what they wanted.

It depends on specs but when I did print billboards needed a much smaller resolution file than a poster for a bus stop. One is printed in a very low raster like 18, the other is printed in offset raster 60. Has to do with the fact that billboard are mostly seen from a distance. No need for 300 dpi. So a billboard could be cheaper than a poster for a bus stop.

Since it’s for print I would also make an actual proof print for example. This way you and the client are not surprised on the looks when you go from RGB to CMYK. Don’t show them your RGB render with very bright blues/greens/orange/reds while those colors are impossible to print in CMYK.

Another good thing of an actual printed proof signed by you + clients is that the people at the print company know what you expect. If things get way too blue/red it’s their fault and they can start over. There’s always a lot of money involved in print and you want to make sure you’re no the one with all rejected print work in your office including the bill.

I did loads of billboards in the past when I did print so if you’ve a question, shout.

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Haha, another desktop publishing engineer from printing house (in the past) in front of monitor here :smile:
Oscar pretty right about colour proofs and managing colours when output going into print.

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These days it’s all easier I think with PDF’s but also easier to make mistakes :slight_smile: The last few trainees we had at the advertising agency which is gone since 2009 already didn’t have a clue about rasters and how films and offset printing worked. Not that bad but I always thought to explain them a bit since I think it helps to know why things work a certain way weather you deliver a set of films or a PDF.