How Much Does a Professional Brand Video Cost?

Let's be real: the price range for professional video is wide, and most people won't give you a number. You ask three companies and get three variations of “it depends” and a link to a contact form.

It does depend. But you can still be told what it depends on.

What Austin actually charges

Real market figures, so you can sanity-check any quote you're holding:

• Short-form social packages — a handful of Reels and Shorts cut from one shoot: roughly $1,500 to $4,000.
• A brand film — the 60-to-90-second company piece with real pre-production behind it: generally $5,000 to $15,000.
• Corporate and internal — training, recruiting, investor updates: around $3,000 to $10,000.
• Campaign films — multiple days, multiple locations: $15,000 and up.
• Ongoing retainers — a steady monthly feed: $3,000 to $8,000 a month.

If you're buying hours rather than a project, freelance videographers around Austin quote roughly $95 to $400 an hour, and day rates for a single operator land near $1,200 to $3,000.

One thing worth knowing if you're comparing quotes across cities: Austin runs about 25 to 40 percent below Los Angeles and New York for equivalent work. That's not a quality gap, it's a cost-of-doing-business gap — and it's one of the real advantages of making things here.

What drives the number

Four things, in the order they actually matter:

• Days. Not hours — days. One shoot day is dramatically cheaper than two, and two consecutive days are dramatically cheaper than a shoot spread across three weeks because your team is only free in pieces.
• Deliverables. One three-minute film is one price. That film plus twelve vertical cuts is a different price, because that's twelve more edits. This is the line item people underestimate every single time.
• People. A one-person crew is a completely different economy than a second camera, an audio operator, and someone running lights. Sometimes you need that. Often you don't, and paying for it doesn't make the film better.
• Rewrites. How locked-in the story is before we roll. Every round of “actually, can we change the angle” after the shoot costs money — and it's the one variable entirely inside your control.

What we charge

Most NVision Films projects fall between $3.5k to $18k, depending on scope:

• $3,500 — a single story, start to finish. One filming day, one hero film, a few cutdowns.
• $8,500 — a three-episode arc across multiple shoots, built to release on a schedule.
• $18,000 — a full season. Up to twelve episodes, multi-location, creative direction throughout.

Alongside those: footage-only days are $225 an hour with a four-hour minimum if you already have the plan and just need a camera and an operator. Shoot days run $1,800 for a half and $3,000 for a full. Music videos start at $2,500.

Note where the season lands — $18,000 across six months is about $3,000 a month, the floor of what retainers go for in this market. Except you get a show instead of a content dump.

The cheap option that isn't cheap

Footage is not the product.

I sell footage-only days and they're genuinely useful — when you already know what the story is. But if you don't, you're paying someone to point a camera at your business and hoping the story turns up in the edit. It usually doesn't. Then the money's spent and you're back where you started, except now there's 200 gigs of clips nobody knows what to do with.

The most expensive video is the one you have to shoot twice.

The number that actually matters

Not the invoice. The cost per thing that works.

A $1,200 video nobody watches is more expensive than a $6,000 shoot that hands you a film, thirty clips, and a reason for someone to call you. I've watched that math play out a hundred times and it goes the same way every time.

What we never do: generic, hollow content. If the brief is “we need something for the website,” the honest answer is usually that you need a sharper reason first — and that conversation is free.

Your story deserves the right eye.

Every project starts with a conversation. Tell Eric what you're building.