We’ve all seen videos of experienced photographers paying tiny sums of money to have their photos edited via an online marketplace, but what happens when someone quotes you video editing services at a cost of just $2 for every minute of the final video?
Sven Pape of This Guy Edits is an experienced editor who has worked for James Cameron and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so you can’t imagine he was looking for someone to take on his editing work. However, his interest was piqued when a random offer to edit his YouTube videos popped into his inbox. The price quoted is alarmingly low, to the point that you could justifiably assume that the results are going to be quite poor. Surely, for this amount of money, the work is not going to be up to scratch.
Regardless of the quality of the resulting video, any editing process requires time, and the editor’s hourly rate when charging little more than $10 for a five-minute video will be incredibly low. In the comments to the video, an Indian editor noted that he gets paid $7 to edit an hour-long wedding video and, by comparison, the video edited for Pape is far simpler. South Asia has long been the home of some of the cheapest clipping path services on the planet, and it seems that the next step might be basic video editing for those who don't have enough time to put straightforward YouTube videos together.
Would you consider paying someone such low rates to cut together a short, simple video? Let us know in the comments below.