What does a video production company cost?

Because "a two-minute video" describes the runtime and nothing else. Two minutes of one person talking in one room and two minutes covering a product launch across three cities are separated by an order of magnitude, and the runtime is identical.

What a serious production company does instead is ask what the video has to accomplish, then scope backward from that. The number comes out of the scope. If the number comes first, the scope will get cut to fit it, and you will find out which parts got cut in the edit.

Every quote you will receive is some arrangement of these. Ask which ones a bid is assuming, and two bids that looked incomparable will line up.

• Shoot days. The single biggest lever. Every day carries crew, gear, locations, and catering whether you use ten hours of it or four.
• Crew size. A two-person documentary crew and a full commercial unit with grips, gaffers, and a first AD are different businesses. Scale follows what the frame has to look like.
• Travel. Flights, hotels, per diems, and shipping gear. A shoot an hour from the studio and a shoot in Las Vegas differ before anyone rolls.
• Post hours. Editorial, color, mix, motion graphics, and VFX. This is where scope creep is invisible until it arrives, because rounds of revision are hours.
• Deliverables. One hero cut is one job. A hero plus six social cuts in three aspect ratios plus a sizzle is closer to three jobs, and it changes how the shoot is framed.
• Usage and term. Where the piece runs and for how long. Paid media, broadcast, and talent buyouts carry costs that have nothing to do with production.

A quote worth comparing separates pre-production, production, and post into their own blocks, and names the deliverables and the number of revision rounds explicitly.

The things most often missing, and worth asking about directly: how many rounds of revisions are included and what happens after that; whether music licensing is in or out; whether talent is bought out and for what term and territory; who owns the raw footage when the job is done; and whether color and mix are included or quoted separately.

Raw footage ownership is the one people forget to ask about and the one they regret. Ask before you sign, not in year two when you want to recut it.

Usually because the briefs were not actually the same. One company assumed two shoot days and one deliverable; another assumed one day and six. Both were reasonable readings of a brief that did not say.

The rest of the gap is structural. A company that owns its cameras and its post suites is not renting them from someone who is charging a margin. A company that subcontracts the edit is passing along someone else's rate plus their own.

Bring the constraint, not just the ask. "We have this much and this deadline, what is achievable" gets a more useful answer than "what would this cost", because it lets a production company scope to the money instead of guessing at it.

Bring the deliverable list and the usage. Those two are more informative than the creative brief for pricing purposes, and they are the two clients most often leave until after the quote.