Rental Insurance

mattsdni

mattsdni

Active member
So I have started to look at renting lights and I noticed that most rental companies do not provide insurance, yet require it. Some have the option to go without insurance for a fee. My question is who do you get insurance through for your rentals and how much does it cost? Unfortunately my school only provides insurance for the locations and not the equipment.
 
If you are a student and don't have your own insurance, I'm not sure how this will work out. Ordinarily, if a business has a general liability policy, and coverage for there own equipment, an additional coverage rider can be purchased for non-owned equipment. This coverage can be surprisingly expensive, and will cover most anything a business might rent including autos, and equipment.

If you are a student, you might try begging (seriously) the rental company. Just remember, this will get sticky if someone breaks something and that does happen.

Grant
 
You can often times just put a deposit on your credit card...Usually it's quite pricey as it's the actual cost of the gear, but they'll put it all back once they confirm you haven't broken anything.

Usually you have to have 1,000,000 general liability cert for the gear, and then an additional 1,000,000 auto liability if you rent a grip truck or something of the sort. I'm definitely not an expert on this, but I've had to go through the process a number of times. I have tried to purchase short term insurance, but always found it to be exceedingly expensive, almost always more so than the gear itself. I can't remember exact numbers, but I can tell you for a two day shoot without explosions, rap music, or anything dangerous, it was going to be at least 1,000 just for insurance...yeah...pricey.

What may be cheaper is finding an owner operator with the gear you need. You pay him for the rental of his lights, and then pay him to come out and work as a gaffer. Usually you can talk most people into letting you take the gear without insurance as long as they are on set...This is probably your best way to go other than the credit card deposit route...
 
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