Almost every VFX enquiry we get opens with a runtime. A 30-second ad, a 90-second brand film, three TikTok cutdowns. Runtime is the wrong unit. VFX cost per shot is the number that actually governs a quote, because the work is not spread evenly across a timeline. One shot in a 30-second ad might need a logo painted off a jacket in four seconds of stable footage. Another might need a phone screen replaced while a hand moves across it. The second one can cost ten times what the first one does, and both live in the same ad.
So the honest answer to "how much does VFX cost" is: it depends on how many shots need work, and how hard each one is. That sounds like a dodge until you see how shots get sorted. Here is the whole system, including the things that quietly move a shot up a tier.
Why VFX Cost Per Shot Beats Pricing by the Minute
A shot is one continuous piece of footage between two cuts. For pricing we treat a shot as running up to about eight seconds, because that is roughly where the effort curve bends: a mask or a track that holds for eight seconds usually holds, and one that falls apart does so well before then.
VFX pricing works this way because the unit of labour is the shot. A compositor opens a shot, solves it, checks every frame, and closes it. Nothing about the shot before it makes the next one faster, apart from reusable setup on repeated angles. Minutes of runtime tell you nothing about that. A two-minute corporate film with four fixes is a smaller job than a 15-second ad where every frame has a replaced screen in it.
It also makes the quote legible to you. When the line items are shots, you can see exactly what you are paying for, drop the three shots that were never going to make the cut, and keep the two that carry the idea.
What Moves a Shot Between Simple, Medium, and Complex
Six things do most of the sorting, and only one of them is visible in a brief.
Camera movement. A locked-off camera means the background behind a removed object can be rebuilt from nearby frames. The moment the camera moves, the fix has to be tracked, and perspective has to stay correct through the whole move.
Things passing in front. A sign you want removed is easy until an actor walks past it. Then the removal has to be masked around the actor on every frame, which is rotoscoping work rather than a straight paint-out.
Edges. Hair, motion blur, smoke, glass, and semi-transparent fabric are where masks fail. A slightly wrong edge reads as a halo or a flicker, and the eye catches it even when the viewer cannot name what is wrong.
Shot length. Past about eight seconds, everything that can drift gets more chances to drift. Long shots are not priced longer out of arithmetic, they are priced longer because they genuinely break more.
Background detail. Flat plaster, a clear sky, or an out-of-focus wall rebuilds cleanly. A patterned tiled floor, a bookshelf, or a crowd does not.
Delivery resolution. Work that holds up at 1080p on a phone does not automatically hold at 4K on a television. Finishing is checked at full delivery resolution, and the higher that is, the less forgiving it gets.
Example Shots in Each Tier
Simple. A logo, a shop sign, a boom mic, or a blemish removed from a stable shot. A static sky swap. A screen insert on a device nothing passes in front of. These usually land in two to three business days.
Medium. A tracked screen replacement with hands moving over it. A green screen key that includes hair. A sky replacement on a moving camera. Beauty retouching on a face in motion. A product label corrected across a shot. Three to five business days is typical.
Complex. Set extension, crowd duplication, a CG product placed into live footage, heavy rotoscoping through motion blur, relighting a scene. We do not put a timeline on these before watching the footage, because the footage decides.
On the money: a simple shot sits in the low three figures in dollars, a medium shot in the mid three figures, and a complex shot starts in the low four figures and is quoted from there. In pesos, that ladder runs from four figures for simple work up through five figures for medium and complex. We publish two price books, USD for international clients and PHP for Philippine businesses, and every shot is scoped individually, so treat those as the shape of the range rather than your quote.
How Much Does Compositing Cost Inside All of This?
Compositing is not a separate line item, it is most of what you are buying. Compositing is the step where a keyed subject, a replaced background, a screen insert, or a generated element get matched to the original footage on light, colour, grain, perspective, and edges until the join is invisible. That matching step is where the hours go, and it is the difference between a shot that works and one that looks pasted on.
This matters more now, not less. AI tools genuinely changed the first pass: masks, fills, and keys that used to be hand-drawn now arrive usable on many shots. What they did not change is the finish. So our per-shot pricing caps compositing hours and generation passes per tier, and a compositor checks the result frame by frame before anything ships. The AI pass compresses the grunt work. It does not decide whether the shot is done.
Grade the Shots Before Anyone Quotes Them
The practical advice, whoever you hire: do not accept a VFX price before someone has watched your footage. Our own process grades every shot simple, medium, or complex first, then prices from the grade, because a brief that says "remove the logos" can describe a two-day job or a two-week one.
Bring the actual clips, not a description. Say what the delivery is, since resolution and aspect ratios change the finishing work. Flag anything that must be legible, like a logo, a price, or a legal line, because those get composited rather than generated. And ask what revisions are included: we include two rounds per shot, and knowing that number upfront is what stops the cost of visual effects for ads from drifting after the quote.
If you are running volume, the economics change shape. Agencies and studios that send us work weekly use a monthly credit desk instead, white-label and under NDA, where a simple shot spends one credit and a medium spends three. It is the same grading system, just prepaid.
Send us the footage and we will grade it and tell you what tier each shot lands in before you commit to anything. You can read how the service works on VFX & Cleanup.
