In Sydney, a solo shooter typically runs $1,200 to $2,500 a day. A small crew with dedicated sound and lighting usually runs $4,000 to $10,000. Broadcast-level production starts near $15,000. These are working 2026 ranges, not quotes. The spread comes down to crew, gear, edit rounds and usage rights.
We run a production studio in North Strathfield and publish our pricing, so this guide uses our own numbers as the worked example. The day rate is the wrong number to budget on, though. It's more useful to work out what each finished asset costs you, which we get to below.
What does a production day typically cost in Sydney?
There's no fixed rate card in this market, but these are the ranges we see after years of quoting against the field. Post-production is often quoted separately, so check what the day rate includes before comparing quotes.
- A solo shooter runs $1,200 to $2,500 a day. That's one person with a camera, basic audio and lighting, who usually edits the footage too. It suits simple talking heads, event coverage and social content.
- A small crew runs $4,000 to $10,000 a day, usually a director or lead shooter with a dedicated sound recordist and lighting, and sometimes a producer. Most corporate and brand work lands here, and it's often the best trade-off between quality and cost.
- Broadcast-level production runs $15,000 to $50,000 or more. That means full crews with gaffers and an art department, plus casting and agency oversight. It's built for TVCs and campaigns where the media spend behind the video justifies the production spend in front of it.
Problems start when you pay for a tier the job doesn't need, or expect broadcast polish from a solo-shooter budget.
What drives the cost?
Four inputs move the price more than anything else.
- Crew is usually the biggest line on a quote. Each specialist adds cost, but some pay for themselves: a dedicated sound recordist is cheaper than a reshoot caused by unusable audio.
- Cinema cameras, proper lighting and a grip kit cost more to put on set than a mirrorless camera and an LED panel. What matters is whether the job needs that gear.
- Editing takes hours, and every revision round adds more. A quote with two included rounds and one with open-ended revisions are pricing different products.
- Usage costs, including talent releases, music licensing and paid-media rights, scale with how widely and how long you'll run the content. Organic social use costs little in rights, while a national paid campaign costs far more.
When two quotes look far apart, it's usually because they've made different assumptions about these four. Ask each supplier to spell out their assumptions, and compare those rather than the totals.
Why per-asset cost beats the day rate
A day rate tells you what a supplier costs. It doesn't tell you what you get for it, and what you get is what your marketing runs on.
A conventional shoot day produces one hero video. The same day, planned properly, can produce that video plus the cutdowns, verticals and channel variations your content calendar needs for the next month or two, for close to the same crew cost.
That's the batch model, and it's how we structure our production days: script and plan every deliverable before anyone picks up a camera, then shoot once for all of them. From the outside the day looks much the same, but the cost per asset drops to a fraction of the conventional version.
When you're comparing quotes, work out how many finished, channel-ready assets the number buys, then divide the price by that. Most quotes don't state the asset count, so you may have to ask for it.
A worked example with our real numbers
Our Batch Day is $6,500 ex GST for one shoot day, with 20 or more channel-ready assets delivered over the following 14 days.
The arithmetic is simple: $6,500 across 20 assets is $325 per asset, and less if the count goes past 20. Spend a similar figure on a single hero video and you get one asset at $6,500.
To be fair, a hero brand film and a batch of channel content are different jobs. If you need one cinematic flagship piece, price that job properly and pay for the tier it needs. Most businesses we talk to need something else: a steady supply of on-brand video for a month of social, ads, EDMs and website content. For that kind of work, per-asset cost is the better way to budget, because assets are what your channels use.
When cheap is expensive
The cheapest quote often ends up costing the most. Cheaper operators can do good work, but a low price often means something has been left out.
In our experience, the expensive failures look like this. Audio recorded on a camera mic can't be rescued in post, so the day has to be reshot. Footage arrives in one format when the campaign needed several. Nobody secured usage rights for paid media, so they get renegotiated later from a weak position. And the one we see most often is a video that's technically fine but strategically pointless, published once and never used again.
That's why we do the thinking first. Our Parallax Session is $4,000 ex GST: a half-day diagnostic that produces an Observation Report and a 90-day roadmap, with the fee credited against any engagement within 30 days. It's there so the production budget goes on the right brief rather than the first one.