How much does a video editor cost in Pakistan?

What moves the price is not minutes of finished video, it is minutes of footage the editor has to watch. A tight two-minute talking head shot in one take is a cheap edit. Forty minutes of handheld footage from a shop floor, cut down to ninety seconds with Urdu captions burned in, is not — somebody has to sit through all forty minutes first. Motion graphics, colour work, sound cleanup on a room with a ceiling fan running, and the number of free revisions all push the same job up two or three times in price.

Rates in the twin cities are dragged upwards by the export market. A competent editor in Rawalpindi who can hold a conversation on a client call will take remote work from a US or Gulf agency and bill several times the local rate, so the good ones stop quoting PKR 2,000 a video quite quickly. Ask about turnaround before you ask about price. And ask what happens during load-shedding: an editor rendering on a laptop with no UPS loses hours, and that shows up as a missed Friday post, not as a line on the invoice.

Work out the per-piece number before you compare anything. Our Starter package is PKR 15,000 for eight edited shorts, which is about PKR 1,875 an edit with the thumbnail, the captions, the SEO and the actual posting included. Growth is PKR 35,000 for four long-form videos plus twelve shorts — sixteen finished pieces, so roughly PKR 2,190 each. Against a freelancer at PKR 3,000 a short who does not post it, does not write the title and disappears in exam week, the retainer is usually the cheaper number once you count the weeks nothing went out.