What an Asset Review and Audit Costs and What Moves the Price
A practical look at how an asset review is priced, which parts of a drive make the work longer or shorter, and what you can do beforehand to keep the scope sensible.
Priya Raman · · 5 minutes to read
Why there is no single price
People often ask for a flat number before we have seen a single folder. I understand the instinct, but an asset review is closer to surveying a house than buying a ticket. Two teams can both say they have forty terabytes of footage and need completely different amounts of attention, because what matters is how that material is arranged, duplicated and described, not only how large it is.
In the Asset Review and Audit module we teach the inventory method that sits behind any quote: list what exists, group it by project, and mark duplicates, gaps and risks. The same method tells us how long a review will take. Once a sample of the drive has been catalogued, the remaining effort becomes predictable, and a price can be agreed on a stated scope instead of a guess made over the phone.
The factors that actually drive the cost
Volume matters, but mostly as a multiplier on everything else. The first real driver is the number of separate locations. Footage spread across a shared server, a handful of portable drives and a cloud folder takes longer to reconcile than the same amount sitting in one place, because every location has its own habits and its own gaps.
The second driver is the state of the naming. A drive where clips carry camera defaults needs far more reading and cross-checking than one with a consistent convention, even a flawed one. The third is the age of the material. Older projects tend to have lost their notes, so identifying what a folder belongs to becomes detective work. Each of these adds hours that can be seen and explained line by line.
- Number of drives, servers and cloud locations
- Consistency of existing file and folder naming
- Age of projects and whether notes survive
- Amount of duplicate or near-duplicate material
- Number of people who need to read the findings
What a review includes and what it leaves out
A review delivers an inventory of footage, project files and exports, a list of duplicates and missing items, and a short note on risks such as unlabelled drives or exports with no matching project. It is a reading and reporting exercise. It does not move, rename or delete anything on your drives, and it does not change permissions.
If your team would like hands-on file handling afterwards, that is scoped and agreed separately, with its own estimate. Keeping the two apart protects you from a review quietly growing into a reorganisation nobody approved. It also means the review price stays stable, because it covers a defined piece of reading and writing rather than open-ended tidying that depends on what we happen to find.
How scope is set before any figure is given
We begin with a short conversation about what you have, where it lives and what worries you most. Then we ask for access to a sample project drive, which is also the stated prerequisite for the module. Working through that sample shows how your material behaves, how deep the folders go and how much repetition there is.
From the sample we write down the scope in plain terms: which locations are covered, which project years, what the findings document will contain and who receives it. The figure follows from that list. If you later decide to add a location or an archive from an earlier period, the change is priced as a change, so the original agreement stays readable and nobody is surprised by an invoice.
Ways to keep the price sensible
Much of the saving comes from preparation that costs nothing. Gather the list of drives and storage accounts in one place before we begin. Tell us which projects are finished and which are still being cut, because live projects need gentler handling and more care about timing. Name one person who can answer questions about older work.
It also helps to decide in advance what you want from the findings. A team that simply wants to know where the duplicates are needs less than a team preparing a full archive handover next quarter. Narrowing the question narrows the work. We would rather quote a focused review that answers your real concern than a broad one you will only skim.
- List every drive and storage account first
- Mark finished projects separately from live ones
- Name one contact for questions about older work
- Decide what the findings will be used for
Cost against the price of not knowing
As autumn gets under way, many teams close out the year's shoots and start thinking about what has to be kept. That is a sensible moment for a review, because a clear picture of what exists makes every later decision cheaper, from buying storage to planning a handover.
The expense of not knowing is rarely visible on an invoice. It shows up as an editor spending an afternoon hunting for a master export, or a client delivery built from the wrong cut. A review will not remove those risks alone, but it tells you where they sit, and that knowledge is what the fee pays for.
The price of an asset review follows the real shape of your material: how many locations it spans, how consistent the naming is, how old the projects are and what you want to learn. Share a sample drive, agree the scope in writing, and keep any file handling as a separate decision. That way the figure stays understandable, and the findings arrive in a form your whole team can use.
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