I have been commissioned to shoot and edit about 100 hours of video. The video quality will be about on level of a soap opera and will be streaming online. It will be a two camera shoot and the scenes are relatively uncomplicated (two to three people talking while eating at a restaurant)

We will not need run-of-place or anything like that.

Anyway, they asked me to put a budget together and I am thinking that we should be able to stay within the $1000 a min range...do you think that is unrealistic?

I don't know what the minimum wage is where you are but this seems very low to do that amount of work.

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Every thing said by me should be taken with a pinch of salt. Unless you have high blood pressure, then I would recommend a salt substitute.

How long is a piece of string?

There are so many factors to be considered that you have to take each production individually. A lot depends on your director and actors as to how many minutes you can film each day.

On Low/Micro Budget shoots the three most important stages are Planning, Planning and er... Planning. The way to save money is to plan everything beforehand and the more you spend at the start of the production, the less you have to spend at the end. So a week spent planning the logistics, saves time in the edit trying to sort out the mess!

When you say 100 hours of video at $1k a minute... $6 million? Sounds a lot but be careful, once you move over the $1m border, the money evaporates very quickly on all sorts of things if someone doesn't keep a very tight reign on the outgoings. You tend to slip into a "we've got millions, so I can spend thousands" mind-think.

To me, it's all about cost versus revenue. If you are getting $100 per minute, but your cost is tightly under control, it should make a lot of sense. Just make sure you do tight project management and don't let your people or equipment stay idle during shooting.