How do I calculate the time involved in the logging/editing phase of a music doc?

[tomperson]

So, I've been recently offered to direct and edit a music documentary. It will feature a band playing in several different locations across my country. They want three versions out of it:

- A trailer/promo
- A 90 minutes DVD
- A 30 minutes WEB/TV version

There will be two or three cameras on location, candid footage (verité style) of the tour, and separate audio tracks for the musicians and ambient sound. How would you calculate how much to charge for something like this? This will be my first "feature" length doc, and my first with so many cameras, so I don't know where to start...But I'm sure this will be a hell of a lot of work...just the logging will be hours and hours...and more hours...

So, how do I calculate the time involved in the logging/editing phase?

PS: Sorry for the crosspost, i didn't really know if the correct place for this was documentary or business forum...

 

[Bobonli]

No answer! I'll take a stab but I don't bill for my work as it is sort of part of my "regualr day job." Why not just keep track of your editing hours on a piece of paper? If I sit at the computer logging and editing for 6 hours, then I include that in the total production time. That seems appropriate and perfectly legal unless you've negotiatied something different or you're being paid a flat fee, in which case your time is irrelevant for billing purposes.

I can't begin to tell you what the going rates are for editing.

 

[tomperson]

The thing is we are developing the budget in order to get funding, so I need to "guesstimate" the amount of work before even filming a single second of footage.

What I meant was more like, how many hours should I expect to work in post-producing something like this?

Lets suppose we have 3 cameras for shooting the gigs and one for candid footage. We have 5 separate audio channels in the gigs. Let's suppose that I end up with something like 36 hours footage, and 2 hours worth of audio for every audio channel.

So, I have at least 36 hours of watching the footage. ??? more hours of logging/transcriptions. ??? more hours of editing. ??? more hours of sound mixing/fixing/etc. ??? more hours of authoring. ??? more hours of who-knows-what ???.

I need a bit of help figuring out the ???!!!

Any advice?