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← Notes·2026-09-09·guide / video

What a product launch video costs, and what moves the price.

A launch video runs from a few days of remote editing to a full shoot. What actually moves the price, and what to prepare before you ask anyone for a quote.

By updated 3 min read

A product launch video from this studio sits in one of three bands. The exact number comes out of a brief, but the band is decided by three things, and you control all of them.

Cut from what you have 4 days
Existing footage, screen recordings and stills. No shoot. The cheapest useful film, and the most common one people do not realise they can make.
Remote-directed shoot 7 days
You or a teammate film to a shot list while I direct on a call, then I cut. Covers most software launches surprisingly well.
Shoot day on location 14 days
A camera travels. Plus travel time. Justified when the product is physical, the place is the story, or the people have to be in a room together.
The three bands a launch film falls into, by production time. Working days, from brief to delivered master.

Those are production days, not calendar days, and they do not include your review time. Two review rounds typically add a week of waiting that no amount of budget compresses.

What changes the answer

Whether a camera has to travel. The single biggest cost is a shoot day, and it is rarely a single day: it is travel, setup, the shoot, and the fact that everyone on your side loses a day too. Remote-directed shoots remove almost all of that. You or a teammate film to a shot list on a phone with a tripod while I direct on a call.

How much of the story already exists. A written spine, meaning what the product is, who it is for, and the one moment it clicks, removes days of back and forth. This is the cheapest lever available and the one most often skipped. Vanpelt Studio turns a rough brief into a shot list and a cut plan before anything is filmed, which is why the story pass is the first thing I do rather than the last.

Runtime and cut-downs. A ninety-second hero film costs less than a ninety-second film plus six vertical clips, a fifteen-second pre-roll and a captioned version. Ask for the cut-downs up front: they are cheap in the same session and expensive a month later, because the edit has to be reopened and the context rebuilt.

Motion graphics and voice. Screen captures with typography are fast. Bespoke animation and a recorded voice-over add days. AI voice is usable for scratch tracks and internal versions; for the public film a real voice still reads better, and audiences are getting quicker at spotting the difference.

Whether anyone has to be on camera. A film with a person in it needs that person available, rehearsed and comfortable, which is a scheduling cost rather than a production one. Films without people are faster and almost always less persuasive.

What to prepare before you write to anyone

This list is most of what separates a quote you can trust from a quote that will move.

  • The one sentence a stranger should repeat after watching.
  • Where the film lives first: site hero, launch post, app store, paid ads. It changes the aspect ratio, the length and whether the first three seconds have to work without sound.
  • Existing footage, recordings and screenshots, even rough ones. They decide the band above.
  • The launch date, counted backwards, minus two review rounds.
  • Who signs off. A film with three approvers and no decider is the single most reliable way to double a timeline.
  • A reference or two you like, and one you do not. The second is more useful than the first.

Why a cheap film is often the right film

The instinct with a launch is to spend at the top of the range, because the launch feels important. That is usually backwards for a first film.

A launch video has one job: make the right person understand the product well enough to click. A film cut from existing footage can do that job. What it cannot do is carry a brand for two years, which is a different brief with a different budget, and one you are better placed to write after the launch has told you who actually showed up.

What this studio does

Story first, then the cheapest shoot that serves it. One operator from brief to master, two review rounds on a private link, and platform cut-downs delivered alongside the master rather than quoted separately.

Two sponsor commercials and a channel film came out of a single two-hour tournament window; the breakdown is in three videos from a two-hour tournament. If you want to see what a genre frame does to a low-budget film, the surf movie is the clearest example on this site.

Sources and further reading

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