Estimating the Cost of your Multimedia Presentation

Bromley College

The costs for your multimedia presentation are likely to be the same, whether it’s training, corporate profile or sales promotion.

To estimate the cost, you first need to estimate its size.

Key to this is knowing how many screens your presentation will need, how much programming is involved, and what additional features you’ll need.

Here’s a simple reckoner to help you do this:

Step 1 – Estimating Runtime

How long do you think your presentation needs to run for? 5 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins, an hour? Allow 100 words for every runtime minute.

So a 5 min presentation will be 500 words, while a 30 min presentation 3,000 words, and so on.

Step 2 – Estimating the number of Screens

Scottish Equitable

You know roughly how many words your presentation needs. Now you’re ready to estimate how many multimedia screens will your presentation need.

A typical 1366×768 sized multimedia screen holds 50-80 words, sometimes less. If you pack in more words than this, you’ll leave very little room for pictures, and it will have an off-putting crowded look.

So if from Step 1 your script is 500 words long, then divide by somewhere between 50 to 80 and you’ll see that you need approx 7-10 screens.

Using the same calculation, a 3,000 word script will need 40-60 screens.

Step 3 – Estimating Everything else

What else will you need?

Once you know the approximate no of screens you need, consider whether you need any animated sections, quizzes or tests or assessments, or video clips.

These all require additional programming.

You’ll also need a Main Menu, and designwork.

Consider also how many sections your script will have. Each one of these will require a sub-menu.

If you want your screens to talk, as apart from simply present written text, then you’ll need Voiceover too.

Knowing this information will allow you to get a realistic price estimate from a multimedia producer.

Step 4 – Summarising your Estimate

If you’ve followed the above, you should be able to invite a multimedia producer to quote. For example:

I require a price for a multimedia sales presentation, with detailed costs, for:

• An estimated runtime of 30 mins
• Approx 3,000 words
• Between 40-60 screen pages, all with Voiceover
• 1 short quiz and one 20 question assessment
• Including one of our existing videos (6 mins long)
• Main menu
• 6 Sub Menus
• Design and artwork
• All produced to our corporate standard

This approach will allow you to obtain reasonably realistic cost quotations by email and get a feel for the range of what’s available.

Knowing the price first obviously helps, before you commit yourself to inviting a shortlist of producers to your office.

If you’d like to invite us to quote you a realistic please write to us with your estimate.

Discover the mix of skills multimedia programming requires >>