What's Your HVX Rental Rate?

7

7/24

Member
What do you charge a client for the use of your HVX?
(In addition to your shooting rate)

What's the rate for 8GB card(s), 16GB card(s) or 32GB card(s)?
 
We have done our pricing and it's a lot more competitive than what some of these people ask, which frankly is a rip-off. We see ourselves renting to low budget filmmakers or students doing weekend projects and we can help make their productions happen, even on the insurance side (co-productions). Our rates are $200/day for just the camera, two batteries, and a charger, plus $40/day for a 16 gig card, and we have lots of accessories available that rent at I think pretty reasonable rates (like the 17" Panasonic monitor, an Indie Dolly, Nikon lenses with RedRock M2 35mm lens adapter, even a laptop and Duel Systems Duel Adapter for transfer, matte box, follow focus, all that good stuff).

I just think the big guys don't charge fair rates for the equipment at all. Even Indie Rentals is overpriced, really overpriced in a few places, look at the fact they have outdated 8 gig cards charging like $50/day? You gotta be kidding me. Those are worth $500 tops, I think they're worth $450 because that's half of a 16 gig card's price and half as much storage space. I wouldn't value 'em above that. You can't charge $50/day for something that's solid state, is extremely unlikely to break, and costs only 10 times as much max as you're renting it for. Just not reasonable.

EDIT: Also I've gotten explanations from many rental companies about why they overprice the heck out of everything and the responses are all lame. I assume most of us here are not huge budget filmmakers, we are low budget filmmakers, serious hobbyists, semi-professionals, whatever, but we have budgetary concerns for the work we do. If you're really huge and don't care about prices, by all means go with a big trusted company like Birns & Sawyer, but they told me why their rates are what they are: "The price of the equipment has nothing to do with what it rents for." That's funny, sure would be news to anyone outside of the film industry! Honda Civics cost $12,000, but I guess that has nothing to do with what Enterprise charges to rent them. Wait, yes it does, it has EVERYTHING to do with it! Cars are durable machines and certainly last a long time, but they need maintenance, too. You don't see car rental places charging you $700/day to rent the Civic just because it cost them $12,000 to buy. They understand the idea of fair market value. That's completely lost on rental companies. I'm not sure if it's because they get too much overhead (building, employees, etc.) or they just are greedy, or probably both, but it's almost impossible to find an item that rents for a reasonable rate. Wooden Nickle has great rates on c-stands and grip equipment, they seem really fair from everything I've heard. But even Mole Richardson, a great company to rent lights from I think because they are the biggest in Hollywood, still their rates are not that reasonable as far as what they list. You have to really haggle with them to get fair prices. I felt I got decent prices for what I got on my last shoot, rented about $12,000 in lighting equipment and it cost me $660, that isn't too bad, that's about 5% of its cost, but it's not too good either! They wanted to charge like $125 for a 2K light, I already bought one 2K, I know it only costs $800 to buy it, I thought maybe the guy was joking or something. None of these prices correspond with reality at any point.

These guys need to hope that nobody like a Wal-Mart or a RED Digital Cinema Company enters their market, because if you setup a decent-sized rental shop in the 20 biggest American cities and ran it like a Wal-Mart, high volume, lower profits, you would take away all of their small and medium sized clients. What they do is charge us all more money because of their "great selection," i.e. even if you have no use for some specialty item, the mere fact that they own it (in their minds) requires them to charge you more on what you rent to justify having it available. I think there's a niche for a company to come in and rent all of the main components of filmmaking, what most people use on common shoots, and undercut these guys big time. Like I said, the major companies, the big studios, they don't care, they will pay for convenience. But imagine if instead of going to Birns & Sawyer in this PRIME Hollywood location I could drive to some warehouse in North Hollywood and get the same equipment for 25% off, I'd still rather do that. Anyway who says Hollywood is a convenient place to pick up equipment? I don't understand that mentality. We chose not to base our offices in Hollywood because I hate Hollywood -- the traffic is miserable, streets close for a million events, tourists are all over the place, there's no parking, and furthermore a lot or even most production companies here aren't based in Hollywood, either. They, like us, are in Burbank. So for me to have to pay extra to rent equipment just because they have a huge building in a prime Hollywood location is not something I'm interested in doing. That's a problem with the business they run. With Wal-Mart, I couldn't afford to make a Wal-Mart and charge the low prices they do, they would put me out of business so quickly it's not even funny. Yet with rental companies it's somehow the opposite -- they can never offer as good of rates as any smaller companies. It's ironic. Rather than, "Gee, we can't compete with the big guys' prices," it's, "Man, they really can't compete with our prices, poor guys." Seems backwards to me...
 
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in l.a. there are at least 5 different guys who rent an hvx, 2-16gb cards and a HD onboard monitor for $200/day or weekend. it's very competitive around here. i rented for a while and eventually bought all the stuff. i don't rent mine to strangers. however i do charge $200/day for everything on top of my rate. this includes the redrock m2 and lenses as well. great deal i think. i have rented it for much more on higher budget gigs.
 
JonathanLB said:
We have done our pricing and it's a lot more competitive than what some of these people ask, which frankly is a rip-off. We see ourselves renting to low budget filmmakers or students doing weekend projects and we can help make their productions happen, even on the insurance side (co-productions). Our rates are $200/day for just the camera, two batteries, and a charger, plus $40/day for a 16 gig card, and we have lots of accessories available that rent at I think pretty reasonable rates (like the 17" Panasonic monitor, an Indie Dolly, Nikon lenses with RedRock M2 35mm lens adapter, even a laptop and Duel Systems Duel Adapter for transfer, matte box, follow focus, all that good stuff).

I just think the big guys don't charge fair rates for the equipment at all. Even Indie Rentals is overpriced, really overpriced in a few places, look at the fact they have outdated 8 gig cards charging like $50/day? You gotta be kidding me. Those are worth $500 tops, I think they're worth $450 because that's half of a 16 gig card's price and half as much storage space. I wouldn't value 'em above that. You can't charge $50/day for something that's solid state, is extremely unlikely to break, and costs only 10 times as much max as you're renting it for. Just not reasonable.

EDIT: Also I've gotten explanations from many rental companies about why they overprice the heck out of everything and the responses are all lame. I assume most of us here are not huge budget filmmakers, we are low budget filmmakers, serious hobbyists, semi-professionals, whatever, but we have budgetary concerns for the work we do. If you're really huge and don't care about prices, by all means go with a big trusted company like Birns & Sawyer, but they told me why their rates are what they are: "The price of the equipment has nothing to do with what it rents for." That's funny, sure would be news to anyone outside of the film industry! Honda Civics cost $12,000, but I guess that has nothing to do with what Enterprise charges to rent them. Wait, yes it does, it has EVERYTHING to do with it! Cars are durable machines and certainly last a long time, but they need maintenance, too. You don't see car rental places charging you $700/day to rent the Civic just because it cost them $12,000 to buy. They understand the idea of fair market value. That's completely lost on rental companies. I'm not sure if it's because they get too much overhead (building, employees, etc.) or they just are greedy, or probably both, but it's almost impossible to find an item that rents for a reasonable rate. Wooden Nickle has great rates on c-stands and grip equipment, they seem really fair from everything I've heard. But even Mole Richardson, a great company to rent lights from I think because they are the biggest in Hollywood, still their rates are not that reasonable as far as what they list. You have to really haggle with them to get fair prices. I felt I got decent prices for what I got on my last shoot, rented about $12,000 in lighting equipment and it cost me $660, that isn't too bad, that's about 5% of its cost, but it's not too good either! They wanted to charge like $125 for a 2K light, I already bought one 2K, I know it only costs $800 to buy it, I thought maybe the guy was joking or something. None of these prices correspond with reality at any point.

These guys need to hope that nobody like a Wal-Mart or a RED Digital Cinema Company enters their market, because if you setup a decent-sized rental shop in the 20 biggest American cities and ran it like a Wal-Mart, high volume, lower profits, you would take away all of their small and medium sized clients. What they do is charge us all more money because of their "great selection," i.e. even if you have no use for some specialty item, the mere fact that they own it (in their minds) requires them to charge you more on what you rent to justify having it available. I think there's a niche for a company to come in and rent all of the main components of filmmaking, what most people use on common shoots, and undercut these guys big time. Like I said, the major companies, the big studios, they don't care, they will pay for convenience. But imagine if instead of going to Birns & Sawyer in this PRIME Hollywood location I could drive to some warehouse in North Hollywood and get the same equipment for 25% off, I'd still rather do that. Anyway who says Hollywood is a convenient place to pick up equipment? I don't understand that mentality. We chose not to base our offices in Hollywood because I hate Hollywood -- the traffic is miserable, streets close for a million events, tourists are all over the place, there's no parking, and furthermore a lot or even most production companies here aren't based in Hollywood, either. They, like us, are in Burbank. So for me to have to pay extra to rent equipment just because they have a huge building in a prime Hollywood location is not something I'm interested in doing. That's a problem with the business they run. With Wal-Mart, I couldn't afford to make a Wal-Mart and charge the low prices they do, they would put me out of business so quickly it's not even funny. Yet with rental companies it's somehow the opposite -- they can never offer as good of rates as any smaller companies. It's ironic. Rather than, "Gee, we can't compete with the big guys' prices," it's, "Man, they really can't compete with our prices, poor guys." Seems backwards to me...
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Jonathan... That's great and congrats on doing it. Too many companies do take advantage of independent filmmakers. KUDOS
 
Here in Orlando you can get a bunch of people and or places to rent the cam plus accessories for 250. That's what I do with my buddies and works out fine. I do not usually rent to strangers as things can get beat up and I don't have rental insurance.

I remember hearing a good rule of thumb in that a rental should be like 1/20- 1/30th of the price.
 
Here in Brazil, you get very different prices.
I've seen guys charging as muc as 450 dollars
I usually rent my HVX with the FS-100 for about 150 dollars.
As far as insurance issues, I have coverage for pratically any sittuation, from being roubed to tsunamis :cheesy:. Great insurrance deal, isn't it?
 
I've had someone try to rent me an 8 gig p2 card for $75 per day. I just bought a second one instead, this was one month ago.
 
Jonathan,

That's cool, but it's an apples/oranges comparison. Joe Smo fixes cars (and cars are everywhere). Not too many people fixes HVX's. If one of those guys breaks, you'll be up the creek as they say.

I think it's great that you're taking the risk, but it is a risk that you're taking, make no mistake about it.

Good luck.
 
There's always somebody, somewhere, who's willing to do something for way cheap. Doesn't make it a good deal though, nor does it make the "going rate" guys chiselers, or the lowballers saints.

You can buy a grey market HVX200 for $3000 if you try, you know. But...please....for your own sake...don't.

I'm in the music recording business primarily, and here in NYC there are quite a few small and not so small studios that charge less than half of my rate. I'm not saying they're all bad, but I do get clients here occasionally that have worked at these places. None of them have ever gone back.

Like the old one-liner says...good, fast, cheap...you can have any two.
 
It's not that much of a risk renting out equipment, honestly. Not if you're doing it right. You don't rent to anyone without insurance unless your own insurance can be used to cover the shoot, like a co-production agreement, and you always are going to have the client use a credit card to put a hold on the cc for the amount of the insurance deductible. If they break the camera, they have to cover it. That's how it goes. Birns & Sawyer and every other actual rental company does the same thing. It's too big of a risk otherwise, you can't just let someone run off with your camera and no assurances you'll get it back in one piece.
 
from a filmmaker's point of view -- i will go to the guys on craigslist who rent hvx/p2 packages for as little as $150/day here in LA, but only for little things. if i'm shooting a feature, i'll work out a deal with a rental house (VER in glendale beats indie rentals every time on this, btw) because if something goes wrong with the camera in the field, you can send it in with a PA to pick up a replacement.

from VER i got two HVXs and six 16gb P2 cards for four weeks for $2000. indie rentals computer system caps them at a 30% discount. that's as high as they will go even though their web site claims they WILL meet anyone's price for the same item. not true. they wouldn't match it.
 
I don't want to talk trash about Indie Rentals, or any other company, but the attitude I got from Indie Rentals wasn't what I expected from a company that has done quite well for themselves. I don't believe they will match any price, either, and it's interesting to hear you say that for sure. I'm not surprised. Some of their prices are quite good, others are not very good at all. I was joking with my business partner we should just say we'll beat any price that Indie Rentals will match by 5%, regardless of what it is, because there goes that guarantee. We'll just post our prices, they say they'll match them, then we'll beat our own posted prices by 5% ;) lol

Yeah I've seen guys on Craig's List who will rent out their stuff for $150/day... I have no idea how they can justify doing that, for us, we want to match service with affordability and we can't just try to undercut absolutely everybody, but we do want to be able to offer a good experience and competitive rates along with extra services or connections if we can help on a project. Is $150/day their fixed price or do they do three-day weeks? Because we still do three-day weeks, we consider five days a week (business week) so we can go $600 for 5 days, or $800 for 7 days since weekends are just one day...

VER in Glendale? Never heard of them, I'll have to check 'em out, the company I really like is EVS in Glendale, they are really cool guys and don't seem in the business of ripping people off, they just seemed cool in general.
 
I rent mine for 200 CHF so that's about 160$! Normaly I rent stuff 2% of the price so 10'000 CHF (HVX + 2x4GB P2 + 1x16 GB P2) will be 200 CHF.
In other words if I rent/work with my HVX for 50 days I have my money back. Insurance in Switzerland is 500 CHF ( 420$) per year for all the equipement.
Steven
http://www.prog-pics.com
 
Nice

Nice

Yeah 2% is a great rate, I mean most of the big guys are going for 5% or so. We figure 3-4% for just one day, but if you want to rent our equipment for one week we can give you much better deals than that. If someone came to me and said I want the HVX200, I want two 16 gig P2 cards, a tripod, your Nikon 35mm lenses, Redrock M2 adapter, a 17" monitor, etc. (maybe even a boom mic, our Indie Dolly, etc.) we could work out a killer deal for them because it's in our best interest to give them the best deal possible, much closer to 2% per day. But renting stuff for just one day makes it less worthwhile for us in many ways, especially because the pickup day and the return day really makes it more like 3 days that equipment can't be used or given to anyone else, and you only are paying for 1 day. Whereas if you rent for 5 days, basically the equipment is out for 7 days, so it's not a big deal. I think any rental company wants to give you a better deal, but you have to either 1) Rent a lot of equipment at once, or 2) Rent equipment for a longer period of time. Or both, of course.

We're mainly in the production business not the rental business, it's just a side service honestly, but if we ended up struggling with production in the future, i.e. making the money we need for our overhead and cost of living, etc., I had considered what it'd be like to buy a small truck and load it up with equipment and then rent an entire array of equipment to small and medium budget shoots on a daily basis for really nice rates. Like imagine you pay $1,000-$1,500 for equipment per day and maybe $300 for the truck, transportation, and the driver's time, and you get a 2K light, four 1K lights, three 650s, two 300s, two 150s, a 4x4 bank KinoFlow, a dolly, a Porta-Jib, boom mic setup and lav. mic setups, a pro monitor, an HVX200 package with a second HVX for backup (plus 4 P2 cards, multiple batteries, tripod, matte box, follow focus, lens adapter, lenses), a laptop for on-set capturing and/or editing, c-stands, flags, apple boxes, extra grip equipment, first aid kit, walkie talkies, gels, Honda generators, etc. Basically "the works." Then you'd figure out if the production had any special needs (HMIs, etc.) and pick them up for the production and deal with basically all of their equipment needs, that'd be a pretty unbeatable deal. Heck if we hadn't already bought everything we'd take a deal like that and just pass on the costs to the client, much easier than figuring out exactly what you need and then going to like 4 different places to get it all, haha.
 
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I will put together a package of my HVX, 2x 8gb P2 cards plus other accessories that users might need and will start at $300/day and up. DFW market is not quite as competitive as LA market. I require that the renter carry insurance and will require an insurance certificate if it is not someone whom I know (and by extension, whom I know is insured). I will sometimes come along to do camera set up to sweeten the deal if necessary.

Ned Soltz
 
TimTyler said:
That's exactly what we do and it's worked out nicely. I recommend it (anyplace but in Seattle, of course!) http://www.inventivepictures.com/rates.asp
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Very nice, and great rates too! I can imagine you'd get a lot of business with that setup, it makes a lot of sense. Plus if you're not just doing it for the business, which I assume you're not, you have the added advantage of being able to just use your own truck fully loaded on your own productions when you want, haha. That's what I think is cool ;)

I'm in Los Angeles, don't worry I'm not coming up to Seattle! haha. I used to live in Portland, though, that's where I grew up. If I got desperate and had to move back to my dad's huge house I could always be like, "Heyyy, dad, mind if I park a truck in the driveway?" haha.
 
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