I have a question regarding pricing for videography work.

I work at a nonprofit childrens home that is 100 years old and recently a faculty member at a neighboring college wrote a play about the story of the college and the childrens home which were both founded by the same man around the beginning of the 20th century.

The play runs for about 45 minutes and is relatively static as far as what would be needed to film it. Well, earlier this year a local man claiming to run a video production company approached someone else at my company about filming the play for us and producing some DVD's for us to be able to share with visitors, donors, board members, etc.

He was kind of secretive about his work and never gave us a ballpark figure on what he was going to charge us for producing the DVD's of the play. There was no contract either stating that we had even agreed to pay him for this project, in fact he even seemed to avoid anyone who asked about final cost until he was done with the project.

Note that as the project was ongoing we were not able to see any preliminary footage or edits to have any sort of checks on the quality of the piece.

Now that the DVD's have been made he has sent us a bill. His pricing scheme worked out to an hourly fee for the actual filming, $250 per hour for on location filming. There were several hours of filming because of the separate narrator sort of shots throughout the piece. That's not a problem.

The problem is that he included a per unit cost related to the length of the finished(edited as delivered) product at $1000 per unit. In this case a unit being one(1) minute, which makes his cost for editing $43,000.

Does that seem as ridiculously high to anyone else as it does to me? Are there any of you guys that are a one man shop that would charge $50,000 for a pretty basic edit of locked off shots, no camera movement, for a 43 minute product?

I've looked at the rate information on the bureau of labor statistics website and can't find anything that would be this expensive even in the 90th percentile of pricing.

On top of all this, the project looks like it was shot on an old minidv handicam complete with fried blown out highlights and an overall lack of detail. The sound in the project is also terrible.

Let me know what you think.

-JPB