How much to charge for rendering animations

[tammo]

I have build a core I7 cluster for rendering HD animations.
It cost a lot of resources and time to construct it so i want to get some money back from my clients.
The problem is that they will never understand this "cents per gigahertz hour" approach from commercial farms.

So how do you charge for rendering animations?

I thought about a price per frame for normal Pal frames, like for example 10 cents, and 4 times the amount for HD Frames.

[thablanch]

$ / per running seconds. They want a 1 minute animation, they want to show something in that minute, and they do not really care about the rendering time.. Up to you after to figure out your operating farm cost to animate for 1 second...

[Christian0816]

Hi Tammo,

a couple of days ago i found that link, maybe its usefull for you.....

http://answers.google.com/answers/th...id/784826.html

best regards

[tammo]

Thanks for the links but i was talking about the cost of rendering not the scene creation.

I have to write something in my quotations like:

(Modeling: 3 days times 320 Euro) + (Animation: 2 Days times 320 Euro) + (Rendering (HD) 2000 Frames times X)

So X = ???

[Olli96]

I would charge something around 2000€ for one minute HD. Check out the prices at rebusfarm.de, they have a "kostenrechner", just to see how much they would charge you and take this as a base for your calculations.

[tammo]

Thanks, thats a good starting point for cost calculations.

I think i will send this pricelist to my clients:

1 Frame PAL 768*576=442.000 Pixel = 25 Cent
1 Frame HD 1280*720=921.600 Pixel = 50 Cent
1 Frame fullHD 1920*1080=2.073.000 Pixel = 100 Cent

[ior=0]

Tammo,
I'd be interested to know the spec of your cluster and how you set it up.

cheers

[AJ Jefferies]

It cost a lot of resources and time to construct it so i want to get some money back from my clients.

So how do you charge for rendering animations?

I'll be honest, I find the concept of charging clients for your investment extremely strange.

Ultimately, it was your decision to buy in more processing power & it should benefit you (i.e. a faster workflow/pipeline). Obviously, if you can turn around projects faster that is a benefit to your clients also, however it's difficult to quantify this on a 'per frame/processor' basis, so you'd be better off adjusting your overall rate.

Personally I would only ever charge a client for time where people are working on a job, not processors.

[ior=0]

I'll be honest, I find the concept of charging clients for your investment extremely strange.

Personally I would only ever charge a client for time where people are working on a job, not processors.

So if you had to send a job out to a render farm would you pass that cost onto the client or absorb it into the cost/sec of the job?

I have always thought that there should be a cost element to rendering, especially animation, if one or more of your machines are tied up for days rendering or you have to buy render farm resources that is a direct cost to you, which you then pass on to the client.
The question is, how you tell the client how much their chicken is going to cost before the egg is laid.

[AJ Jefferies]

So if you had to send a job out to a render farm would you pass that cost onto the client or absorb it into the cost/sec of the job?

If the client wanted something rendered faster than my setup allowed of producing then yes, I would pass that cost on. But I would let them know up front that they were paying to have it sooner.

My point is, it's better to adjust your overall cost to accomodate your overheads than charge a client extra because you spent x amount of thousands on new equipment.

Let me put it another way, if you bought yourself a new workstation would you then add that cost to all future jobs...?

[tammo]

Recently another studio has send me 28 max files with textures for rendering.
So i should have billed them only the time it took me to load up the files, adjust the bitmap and output paths and sending to backburner?

On my current project i have to render 11000 HD frames of an outdoor animation with thousands of proxy trees. Average render time per frame on a coreI7 is 45 minutes. According to the rebusfarm calculator this would cost 14.800,- EUR or 20.900 USD.

It may be different for stills but i have to charge something for rendering animations.

Regarding the hardware:
Its based on Cheap mainboards with simple graphic cards (i couldnt find onboard graphic chipsets) , 12 GB of RAM and CoreI7-920 processors.
The boards are stacked in a metal IKEA cupboard with the front and back removed.
I had some problems with the airflow so it has still an open front at this time.
There are two high performance fans on each level, one at the front and the other one on the backside. I will post some pictures when its done.

[ior=0]

Tammo,
I believe I saw a web-site showing the build process, looked very impressive and lots of wires if I remember. Must keep you nice and warm in the winter
...I found the link...is that yours?

http://helmer.sfe.se/

I think you're right charging for animation as it is a big overhead in time and resources. You are charging for that time and those resources not for you initial investment.

[mike_kennedy]

Don't bill for this separately, if you screw some thing up you eat it obviously, but it can also come back on you as an excuse from the client. Better to build it into the price and add rush fees if you have to install new hardware or outsource to meet the deadline.