What a Feature Edit Actually Costs, Per Minute

Ask what an editor costs on an independent feature and you'll get two answers that don't sound like they belong to the same job. The first is an hourly rate — independent films typically pay professional editors $30-50 an hour, the number most first-time producers anchor a schedule to. The second shows up later, on a locked-cut invoice for a scene that needed real structural work: $2,000-5,000 per finished minute. Neither number is wrong. They're pricing different things, and a feature edit trades between them constantly.

This is about what pushes a minute of screen time into four figures, what a flat editing line quietly assumes away, and why editorial ends up as the post budget line a supervisor protects hardest.

The Hourly Number Everyone Quotes

The $30-50/hour figure is real, and it's the one most budgets are built around first. It prices an editor's time — not the difficulty of the material. A clean two-person dialogue scene and a five-source verité sequence with mismatched frame rates cost the same per hour on paper, even though one takes an afternoon and the other takes a week.

That's where the hourly frame starts to mislead. A feature typically needs 12-16 weeks of editorial work before revisions and delivery even enter the schedule. Multiply an hourly rate across that timeline and the number a producer budgeted in week one rarely survives to lock.

What Actually Pushes a Minute Into Four Figures

The material that doesn't fit neatly on an hourly line is what moves a minute from the low end of the range toward $2,000-5,000: structural rework on a scene that isn't working in its first assembly, sequences that depend on VFX turnarounds the edit has to accommodate, and the multiple director or producer cut passes that a story earns on its way to a locked reel.

A per-minute figure, read this way, isn't pricing runtime. It's a proxy for how many passes a minute of finished film survives before it's approved — a scene that locks on the first cut costs nothing like a scene that gets rebuilt four times. On a recent festival cut, a single four-minute opening sequence went through six structural passes before the director and editor agreed it worked; a two-minute coverage scene two reels later locked on the first assembly. Averaged across the film, those two scenes land nowhere near the same per-minute number, even though they sat in the same timeline.

The Flat-Fee Trap

On a true micro-budget feature, editing sometimes skips both models entirely and shows up as one flat number. A sample independent line budget prices the entire edit at $5,000 — one line, no hourly math, done. That model works, but only when the schedule is compressed to match it, and only when the footage was shot with the edit already in mind: fewer setups, tighter coverage, less room for the cut to go looking for a different film than the one that was scripted.

What it doesn't buy is a second pass after a rough test screening, and it doesn't buy the 12-16 week runway that both the hourly and per-minute models assume. A flat fee is a bet that the first assembly is close enough to the final film that revisions stay small. Sometimes that bet pays off. When it doesn't, the gap between what was budgeted and what the cut actually needed shows up as unpaid overtime for whoever's still in the room — or as a second, unbudgeted editor brought in to finish what the flat fee didn't cover.

Why Editorial Eats the Biggest Slice

Editorial commonly eats 30-35% of a post budget — ahead of sound design and mix at 25-30%, visual effects at 20-25%, and color at 15-20%. That ordering isn't arbitrary. Sound, color, and delivery all wait on picture lock, so a slow or underfunded edit doesn't just cost its own line — it compresses everything scheduled after it.

We've written before about the percentage rule we don't follow for allocating a post budget across departments. Even a studio skeptical of fixed percentages still protects editorial's share first, because the cost of shorting it doesn't stay contained to the edit — it moves downstream. The 10-15% contingency that supervisors typically hold in reserve is what absorbs the distance between the hourly quote a producer budgeted and the per-minute reality a difficult scene turns out to need.

These two numbers were never in conflict. The hourly rate prices an editor's time; the per-minute rate prices how many times a scene has to be re-cut before it earns its place in the film. Budgeting a feature edit well means budgeting for revisions, not just for runtime — the same discipline behind what a music supervision line actually buys on the sound and score side of a project. On our own cuts, we scope against passes, not hours, and price the schedule accordingly before the first frame goes on the timeline.