ReelForge — Video Production & Post Business Command Center

The shoot is the short part.

ReelForge is a complete, private, 100% offline operating system for a video business — weddings, brand films, social retainers, event coverage, product film and a stock library. 15 integrated modules and 39 tools in a single HTML file, plus a live 11-sheet Excel workbook. Nothing installs. No account. No fee, rate or client name ever leaves your computer.

A day rate prices the part the client watched you do

The worked example inside quotes $2,125 a day for a wedding film and is pleased with it. Across five weddings that is 72 hours on the shoot and 305 hours in post — so the day rate prices 19% of the job, and the other 81% happens after everyone has gone home.

Divide the fee by all of it and it pays $33.79 an hour, against a floor of $35 the owner set for themselves. Blended across every kind of work the studio takes, a shoot hour looks like $254 and the business actually pays $54.96. The last column of that screen is the day rate each category would need to reach the target — and the same screen shows the other answer, which is to cut the post rather than raise the price.

The cost nobody has ever shown you

Every job you have ever delivered is still on a drive, still costing money, and can never be billed again. Seventy-two finished jobs take 59 terabytes and cost $7,228 a year — 13.5% of everything billed this year, spent on work from previous ones. Projected forward at the rate this studio delivers, holding everything for ten more years costs $182,708. It is the only cost in a video business that grows because you did well.

Twenty-one screens

The work — Project Register, where post is never one figure · The Day Rate Fiction (the flagship) · Per Finished Minute, where a product film takes 22.1 post hours a minute and an event recap takes 2.1 · Where The Hours Go, post split seven ways, with the shape of it for every kind of job you take.

In post — Shoot and Edit Ratio, with a marginal ratio kept separate from the blended one · The Revision Spiral, measuring what everybody suspects: inside a single film each round runs 35% longer than the one before it · Turnaround, and where lateness concentrates · Music and Licensing.

Kit and vault — Kit and Depreciation, priced per shoot day whether or not it left the cupboard · The Archive · Crew and Second Shooters, asking whether the extra camera pays once the extra post is counted.

Selling it — Packages against the hours they actually consume · Quotes and Win Rate, where 77% is a warning rather than a trophy · Retainers, compared with one-off work on the same measures · Clients and repeat work · Stock Footage.

Eight calculators

Day rate undone · Finished minute · Quote a job, phase by phase, which is the only kind of estimate that survives contact with the job · Revision rounds · Archive over ten years · Kit payback · Second shooter · Stock library. Every one of them opens with your own figures already in it.

Twelve copy-ready pieces

The estimate that shows the hours · why it costs that · the revision clause · the scope-change note · the call sheet · the shot-list header · the delivery note · the review ask · the retainer proposal · the price-rise notice · the archive policy · the chase for an overdue invoice.

What you get

• ReelForge-Video-Production-Command-Center.html — the whole application, one file, offline
• ReelForge-Companion-Workbook.xlsx — 11 live formula-driven sheets
• Quick-Start-Guide.html — eight steps to your first real number
• How-To-Use-Guide.html — the full manual, screen by screen
• README.txt and LICENSE.txt

Genuinely private. It makes no network requests of any kind. Your fees, rates, client names and quotes stay in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere.

Honest by design. Post hours are never typed as one number — they come off a phase log, so correcting one phase moves every screen. The marginal edit ratio is kept apart from the blended one, because grading, mixing and titles do not scale with how many cards you filled. And where a number could only be guessed at — what lateness costs you in referrals, what a second angle adds to a film, what a lost quote was really worth — the item is listed with nothing against it rather than a figure somebody invented.

ReelForge performs arithmetic on figures you supply. It is not legal, tax, insurance or contractual advice, and it is not a rights-clearance system. Music licence terms, royalty rates and storage prices change without notice and are whatever you type in.