Typical Video Production Budget Breakdown

When you or your company makes a significant investment, it’s not crazy to wonder where all of your money is going.

A typical video production house, creative studio, or ad agency will assure you that they’ll generate big-time results, but they’re often sparse on the details of how, exactly, they’re going to do it.

Every video production budget is a little bit different, but the breakdown below highlights a few of the things video production teams invest in, why, and roughly how much they might invest in it.

What the breakdown does not include is the fact that all prices given to you by a video production company involve some sort of profit on top of all of this. The exact amount they’ll keep for profit varies tremendously based on who it is that you’re working with.

Crew

Great production value relies heavily on great crew members who have the know-how necessary to bring a creative vision to life.

Since they are so important, it’s really no surprise that they come at a premium. On some shoots, paying the crew, feeding them, and paying all of the expenses associated with them could cost as much as 40 – 60% of the production budget.

This number may increase or decrease significantly depending on the production (since they really are all different.) For instance, a video that requires set building, numerous locations, or something of the like will probably see crew costs as a smaller portion of the total budget.

However, I point to this as a rule of thumb because great videos are never produced without the help of these key people.

Talent

It’s hard to give a good estimate for how the cost of talent impacts our production budget breakdown. On some shoots, the total cost of talent comes up to absolutely nothing – it will be the company founder or someone else from an internal team on camera.

In other cases (like when you’re making use of celebrity talent) this could easily be the biggest line item on your entire production budget.

For the sake of averaging everything out, we’ll assume that, in this case, you’ll end up somewhere in the middle. Let’s say you hire a couple of actors to play key characters. They’re not celebrities, but they are talented pros.

In this case, expect talent to account for about 10 – 25% of your total budget.

As with the investment necessary for great crew members, it’s certainly true that investing in good on-screen talent pays off in the long run.

Equipment

With a breakdown like this one, it’s easy to see how video production can get expensive…quickly.

To produce a genuinely great product, your video production partner will need to make use of a significant amount of pro-grade equipment necessary for all sorts of applications.

They probably do have some of what they need on hand, but since video production equipment standards are ever-changing, they’re likely renting some as well. They may even be paying certain freelancers an additional fee just for the use of their personal equipment.

As with anything else on this list, we’ll add in the quick disclaimer that equipment needs are largely dependent on the project’s scope of work.

However, on a “typical” project, equipment costs account for about 20% of a production budget.

Post-Production

If you’re wondering where the final 30% or so of a production budget is going, you just found it.

Post-production costs like editing software, motion effects work, music licensing, and all the like adds up to be a pretty significant sum for most projects.

Even an extremely short shoot translates to hours upon hours spent in post-production. This time-consuming process is sometimes said to be the place where the original story is essentially “re-written” and refined significantly.

Naturally, then, there’s a reasonably large investment involved in the process.