How would you charge for 'sweetening/de-noising' audio files

[Chase Yeremian]

For the people here who commonly do this work. How do you structure pricing for "fixing" audio files.

If a client gave you X minute long file that needed EQ, Denoising, and repair of some clipping, do you charge them for software, file duration, your time etc?

 

My goal is to not drive rates into the ground and to be reasonable.

 

Thanks!

[cory]

Charge them for your time, minimum 1 hour.

[Ze Frias]

Charge them for your time, minimum 1 hour.

 

+1

[Marc Wielage]

If it's my own work and only a couple of minutes of material, I'll judge it by the nature of the client and my relationship with them. If it's something I can knock out in 20 minutes, I'll give it to them for nothing. If it's hours and hours of work, and it stems from a bad location that had nothing to do with me, then they get charged some reasonable rate, maybe $50-$60 an hour of studio time.

 

The most extensive iZotope/denoising job I ever did was for a Holocaust video a close friend of mine shot, and (against my advice) he tried doing all his own location sound work. That took a couple of days of work, but because it was a non-profit and because this was a close personal friend, plus I wasn't already booked, I did it gratis. The good news on that was that this forced me to learn a lot about the ins and outs of iZotope RX. There was a night-and-day difference in sound quality for the material. 

[Jay Rose]

If the client is a friend, the clip is short, and I can do it quickly, I'll go with Marc's solution and do it as a courtesy.

 

If it's a gig, I'll charge by the hour at my studio rate.

 

If it's a very long file that requires realtime processing, but can be unsupervised while it's rolling, I used to charge normal rate for the setup and then half-rate for unsupervised transfer. But there are fewer and fewer of these… either you have to get in there and retouch using RX3, or it'll roll through a plug-in much faster than realtime. Even if you have to stack a bunch of plugs, or write your own for the purpose in something like Sonic Birth, it can still be a fast offline render.