How do the costs of shooting on the ALEXA or ARRIFLEX D-21 stack up to 35mm or Super 16? What are the price differences between shooting ALEXA ProRes vs. data? We've created a simple, straightforward guide to show the approximate equipment and facility costs for one day of shooting on a TV production or feature film.

This daily production budget covers typical costs for production stock, equipment rental and dailies services. As actual costs depend on many factors and production discounts may be available for extended shooting schedules, we recommend that you obtain quotes from your suppliers for your specific project.

This budget does not include production labor costs. The only significant difference is the addition of a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) when using the D-21 camera with tape or data

With evolving Data workflows, it is now possible to provide production dailies services on location, including sync and logging, editorial encoding, digitizing for the internet and even archiving to LTO4. Please note that this will require additional labor and technical support, and is merely a shift of the function (and the costs) from the post house to the production location. This may make sense for remote production locations.

The cost of post production finishing in a Digital Intermediate process is not included here. Although most of the major DI component costs are the same regardless of format, there are differences. For example, film formats (particularly 16mm) require dustbusting and digital does not. If you use ARRIRAW Data format, the process of pulling selects and rendering the shots to DPX files for the DI process is similar to scanning camera reels, and should be budgeted accordingly. Please obtain a quote from your post production facility.