What It Actually Costs Me to Work as an Editor
Everyone in post production is chasing answers to the same handful of questions. How do I quote a client as an editor, especially when I’m just starting out? What do I actually need to have to be successful? Where do I find SFX, music, or graphics, and how much do they cost? So I figured I’d open up my own bag and show you exactly what’s in my toolkit as a working editor, and what it costs me to keep it. This is my way. It’s not THE way. Nothing on this list makes me successful, but the combination of it all helps me accomplish my job on a day to day basis.
I should say up front that I work differently than a prototypical picture editor. On a lot of the shows and films I cut, I’m also a producer. I offer more than just an edit much of the time. I research. I find and pull archival. I can do light VFX work, graphics, color/sound passes. I manage teams. And I pay attention to the business side, not just the creative side. Managing clients, giving notes to other editors, help hire, feedback on scripts, mentor, and more. To do this, I need to have a handful of tools in the bag ready to go.
This is a hybrid post on a few levels. What I use day to day and month to month. What I bought once and still lean on. What I rent in short bursts and rotate out. And underneath all of it, why I do it this way, what weekly rates I try to stay within to keep this life running/paid for, and what I do on the side to hire other people and help them build something too. Let’s start with the toolkit and the costs, because that’s probably what got you here.
MY MONTHLY MUST-HAVES
This is my month to month breakdown, over the course of a year, for the software and programs I consider non-negotiable in my workflow. Where something is billed annually, I’ve broken it down to the monthly cost so it’s all apples to apples. You’ll see that this is quickly adds up to the equivalent of a monthly car payment.
Avid Media Composer: $23.18/month ($278.19/year)
Adobe Creative Cloud: $37.42/month
Soundstripe (Individual): $10.64/month ($127.63/year)
Newspapers.com: $6.24/month ($74.90/year)
Claude: $100/month
Google AI Pro: $19.99/month
ElevenLabs: $5/month
LucidLink: $80/month
Frame.io: $15/month + the Adobe free amount included
PlayPhrase.me: $5/month
Dropbox Plus: $9.99/month ($119.88/year)
Artlist.io: $17.79/month ($213.43/year)
QuickBooks Self-Employed: $21.64/month
Motion Array: $27.05/month
Meta Verified: $16.08/month
AT&T Fiber: $89.99/month
ACE, BFE, and TV Academy memberships: $69.74/month
Total: $554.75/month
A couple of these deserve a note. Meta Verified is the one I go back and forth on. Do I think a blue checkmark is a must-have? Not really. But it helps my reach, which means posts like this one actually land in front of the people they’re meant for. My whole goal here is to help people get better and help more people understand what this profession really involves, so anything that widens that reach earns its spot. Motion Array is expensive for being generic much of the time, BUT it saves me with so much temp work at times. In fact, I photoshopped these titles with stock images from motion array to illustrate my point.
ONE-TIME BUYS THAT HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR THEMSELVES
Not everything is a rental. A few things I bought once and have gotten my money out of many times over:
DaVinci Resolve Studio: free (I bought a Blackmagic camera and the Studio version came with it = instant value)
Downie 4: $22.99 one-time
Topaz Video AI: a one-time fee back when I bought it
FileMaker Pro: around $625 (I think I paid a little less, but that was a few years back)
Topaz is a sore subject. I paid the one-time fee when that was the deal, and then they changed their model a little so it doesn’t go a long way, which kind of sucks. It’s still usable, but has some limits. Filemaker is great for aspiring assistant editors. combine it with AI and it can really be powerful.
APPS I RENT, THEN CANCEL, THEN RENT AGAIN
Some tools I only need in bursts, so I spin them up for a project and shut them off when it wraps. Prices depend on how much I use them:
RunwayML: around $15/month for what I use
Louper.io: free, up to around $33/month for what I use, but free version caps to 20mins at a time.
Riverside: free, up to around $39/month for what I use
KIT FEES
Quick note: Many budgets on larger scale films/shows will pay kit fees for use of your equipment. Especially if working remote. So keep that in mind when quoting jobs.
THE FREE STUFF I’D BE LOST WITHOUT
Not everything worth having costs money. These are free and they earn their spot on my machine:
This is my baseline. This is what I need just to be ready to work the way I need to, at the speed I need to. Have I cancelled some of these during slow stretches? Absolutely. You have to be disciplined about that, because in a world where we don’t own our software and just rent everything, it’s shockingly easy to forget what you’re even paying for. Guilty. We pay rent on tools we’re not even using. Why the hell do we put up with this as a society?! Okay. I’ll stop and stay focused. The key is to stop paying rent in places you’re not living. Go look through your bank statements now! Or wait, keep reading first THEN go!
WHY I PAY FOR SPEED
So much of what I do comes down to speed. As an editor working outside the industry hubs, I take jobs that pay the bills while I chase the work I’m actually passionate about. Some of those jobs are just paychecks, and they’re less glamorous. Corporate gigs, client work, quick one-off motion graphics treatments, the day gig that needs a body but it keeps me able to build toward where I actually want to be, which is narrative features and TV and more high end documentary work.
Right now, a lot of the narrative work I cut on the side is indie and pays very little. But to build those narrative credits and chops, I take them. So I need tools that support me when I have little resources. That’s why I pay more each month for things like Claude and Google AI Pro. They let me research, think, and search faster for things I used to do entirely by hand. Sorting a drive, digging through SFX/MX libraries, scripting out a process. That stuff can eat hours. Having a system like this in the workflow lets me get through it fast. I didn’t have this until recently, and it’s changed how I work. When you’re on low budget indies that can’t pay a lot of people to help, having a productivity saver is worth an out of pocket cost to me.
LucidLink is another one that’s higher than I’d like but earns it. It lets me bring on assistants and junior editors much more easily, because I can organize a project locally and it lives on the cloud at the same time. I can pop in, check their work, leave notes, pass bins, and take over once it’s ready for me. It’s a real cost, but it means I’m not buying a $1,000 drive, shipping it across the country, and adding to my bottom line just to collaborate. My use of Claude is probably part of why those drives are so expensive right now, which isn’t lost on me…
WHY I CALL IT AN EDITING COMPANY
I like to say I’m running an editing company, because I’m not a post house exactly...yet. It’s just me an a few freelancers occasionally. I’m an editor working on projects with a set budget and hiring other people to help me on those projects much of time time out of my own pocket/budgets, so I can take on more and keep building toward the future I want. It’s my own personal editing business model. Maybe that is a post house. If so, it’s one built entirely around the creative work. Call it what you want. The goal is that by the time I get where I’m going, I can bring the people who helped me along and help them build their futures. If you’re wondering I don’t subcontract on projects that hire me independently, only projects through my company. So don’t go around and sub out your work, sit on the couch, and tell people Corey Frost told me to do that lol. It’s worked out beforehand already with clients.
This is also a big part of why I live where I live, which I’ve written about before. If I tried to run this in NYC or LA, I’d have to scale back tenfold just because of the cost of everything. Maybe living there would outweigh that. Maybe not. Either way, I’d have to be more strategic and more single-minded about money. And that’s before you factor in actual life. Healthcare, kids, daycare, cars, a mortgage, home repairs, food, the day to day. In a bigger city all of that climbs, and my output would probably drop, because I’d have to scale back on editing costs and do more of it manually myself instead of hiring out or paying for tools that keep me fast.
WHAT THE WORK IS ACTUALLY WORTH
Ok now we’re going deeper! Costs are only half the math. The other half is what the work should pay, and that’s where most people starting out have no reference point at all. So here’s the one I use.
I don’t treat these as hard, fixed numbers, because no two projects are the same. Budgets are all over the place these days. I treat them as a starting point to think through. The best reference I have is what the union has already negotiated. IATSE and the Editors Guild sat across the table from the studios and landed on rates both sides could live with. That’s about as close as our field gets to a considered, fair, workable number for the work we do. You can view these contracts on their website for yourself.
I’m giving you these as ranges on purpose. An average would hide the story, and the spread is the whole point.
Here’s where the current Editors Guild weekly guarantees land, by role and by budget:
Editor, high budget union work: roughly $4,050 to $4,625/week +
Editor, low budget theatrical: roughly $2,670 to $4,540/week
Assistant Editor, high budget union work: roughly $2,375 to $2,725/week
Assistant Editor, low budget theatrical: roughly $1,635 to $2,640/week
The thing to understand about the low budget numbers is that they move with the size of the production. Low budget theatrical is broken into tiers based on the film’s budget, so a scrappy indie in the bottom tier pays the low end, while something budgeted near the top of the low budget cap pays close to full scale.
Here’s the honest part. Not every project hits these. These are union numbers with budgets still in the millions. So you might not see these types of budgets on micro-budget films or shorts. You’ll be lucky if so. Most of the passion and investment gigs I take don’t come close. When I take one that doesn’t, I don’t just eat the above costs and move on. I look at everything I’ve got going and find ways to pull my overall number back up into these ranges. Sometimes that means hiring out a couple of smaller gigs so they run in the background while I focus on the one that matters. Sometimes it means taking one larger project and easing my hours on the smaller ones over a longer schedule. It’s a constant give and take with time and resources, and that’s the part nobody tells you about. We want to make a living as creatives while pursuing what we’re passionate about. For more of us, those two things don’t always align. So I’ve found a way to keep pursing both through my company.
WHY I’M TELLING YOU ALL OF THIS
I lay this out because so many people don’t get how much we actually spend before cutting a project. The people hiring don’t get it. Clients don’t get it. But if you want to survive and sustain a career in this, YOU have to get it. You have to know what things cost in order to charge for them. It’s simple math. You also need to know what others in this industry are getting so you aren’t just working for pennies forever. Knowledge is power.
If the tools I consider essential run me $554.75 a month, I’m not quoting a project that doesn’t at least cover that, plus my actual time. If I do take something under that number, it’s because I believe in it, or because it serves my own creative future by making me better. That’s the only reason to eat the cost. But it’s very rare especially at where I sit in my own career. You have to invest in your future a little yes, but you cannot cut yourself off from the present. Because most of the time, it doesn’t pay off in filmmaking. That film you thought would start a career wildfire ends up more like a candle on a 1-year old’s birthday cake.
So when I take a no-budget short, I know I have to line up another gig at full rate to offset it. Or I take a corporate client gig through my company, use it to hire and pay my team, and cut the passion project in parallel. I put that pressure on myself so I don’t fall behind financially or creatively. The paying work funds the work I love, and the work I love is what I’m actually building toward. Sometimes the align in a single project and sometimes they don’t.
Here’s the takeaway I’d give my younger self. Know your number. Not a vague sense of it, the actual figure. Once you know exactly what it costs you to be ready to work, quoting stops feeling like a guess and starts feeling like math. And the discipline part matters just as much. When the work slows down (like for many it has), go through your subscription list and cancel what you’re not using. Stop paying rent in places you’re not living. Then when the next project lands, you spin it all back up and you’re ready to go.
If you found this helpful, go check out my other posts. I try to be as open and honest as possible! Happy Editing!