Who buys medical animations?
The buyers for medical animation can be an individual or an organization or a company. Different buyers have different needs. Some want to just demonstrate a specific product, procedure, or mechanism whereas others are very particular about precise measurements, anatomical correctness, and accuracy of animations. The main buyers based on our experience in the previous five years are:
- Medical device manufacturers and marketers: Most of them want to create the 3d models of their devices they want to present to a certain authority or a market. They commonly want a 360-degree view and an exploded view of their devices. Sometimes they require text animations, and background music to be added to the final video so that they can use the animation for advertisement purposes in social media.
- Pharmaceutical industry: They mainly want the animations for their advertisement and health-education of their employees and general people. In addition, their manufacturing process, safety measures, and cutting-edge technology can be better presented by medical animation videos.
- Hospital/ clinics: Hospitals and clinics mainly want medical animations for advertisement and patient education. They generally want to show how a specific medical treatment or surgical operation works.
- Doctors and scientists: They want medical animations when they invent something new. They want to present their ideas to their supervisors, or a journal.
- Educationists: We occasionally get knocks from education providers. Most of them are involved with the creation of medical course materials, learning institutes, universities, YouTube medical education channels, and Learning management systems. They generally want to present physiological and pathological processes happening at microscopic and macroscopic levels.
How much a medical animation video costs?
Almost every day someone knocks us and asks, hey I want to create a medical 3d animation video for 2-3 minutes of duration, how much will be the cost? The answer isn’t a simple one, because we need to know some of the details before giving an estimated cost. The medical animation video cost depends on many factors, some important factors are:
- Render quality and resolution: Is it going to be a 1080p 30 FPS video or a 4K 60 FPS video? The resolution and frame rate matters because these directly correlates with the render times. The quality of renders also matters, a grainy render scene with one light source will cost less than a noise-free well-lighted render scene.
- Animation duration: The animation duration is directly proportional to the animation price.
- The complexity of models: The models used for 3d medical animation videos can be very complex, costly, and time-consuming to create. Most of the time it is not worth to create all the models from the scratch for a single animation video. There are many 3d models selling websites out there, our preferred ones are – cgtrader, and turbosquid. These sites can sell a particular model at a cheap price because they sell that model to thousands of buyers. These models can easily be modified in 3d animation software to create uniquity.
- The complexity of animation: Some animations can be more complex than others. For example how a pen works will be much easier to animate compared to how the human nervous system works!
Why medical animations can be costly?
If you knock the medical animation companies for a price quote for your desired animation then chances are they will charge you way more than you have expected. But no blames goes to them because the hardware, software, skill set, and studio setup required to create a high-quality medical animation video doesn’t come at cheap prices. You will better understand what makes the animation costly if you read below:
- High-spec computers, ideally with Intel Core i9 or AMD Threadripper processors are needed to render out the frames. Even with the super high spec desktops at least two minutes of time is required to render out a 1920 X 1080 pixel (Full HD) frame in a reasonable quality. The render times will be significantly more for a 4k or 8k frame. Now you can do the math – if you need a two minutes long animation at 60 frames per second, then the render time will be 120 seconds X 60 frames per second X 2 minutes to render each frame = 14400 minutes = 240 hours = 10 days. Animation companies solve this problem by combining multiple computers to do batch renders. In addition, the computers must also have high-spec GPUs (for example Nvidia Quadro) to calculate all the polygons. These computers run all day to render out the frames and consume a lot of electricity (usually more than 500 watts per computer).
- The software used to create animations are very costly. There might be some free medical animation software and a few low priced ones. But all these have certain limitations. We use Autodesk Maya in our studio for animation creation. This is considered as the industry standard and extremely versatile software. The learning curve for this software is very stiff. The animation software only creates the frames required for the animation. But to render out the frames one requires a renderer, and to combine all these frames into a video, video editing software is required. We use Arnold renderer to render out the frames and Adobe Premiere Pro for final video creation. Sometimes we use Steinberg Cubase if audio editing is required, and Adobe After Effects if VFX is needed. Other software commonly used to create medical animations are Blender (free software and easy to learn), Cinema 4d, 3ds Max, etc.
- A high-skilled team is a prerequisite to creating a medical animation. An animator must go through years of training to create high-quality animations. He/ she must know about human anatomy, motion, and different medical mechanisms to create medical animations. Sometimes, helps from a health professional is needed to make the animations accurate. The ideal medical animation creation team should consist of 3d animators, health-professionals, and video/audio editors.
- A sophisticated studio setup is essential to keep all the gears safely and do the teamwork efficiently. The studio setup is not only limited to buying office spaces and furniture but also motion capture devices and green screen rooms are required.
Can I buy medical animations at a cheap price?
The answer is ‘yes’ if you don’t think of good quality. There are many freelancers advertising their gigs on Fiverr. You can get them in Upwork, Freelancer, and Peopleperhour as well. But most of these animators are a single person sitting in front of an average PC. Many of them may use pirated software. They will probably produce a low to average quality animation for you. Those who produce high-quality medical animations usually do some sort of teamwork and charge higher. Alternatively, you can knock us with your animation requirements and get a price quote from us. Our prices are significantly lower than our competitors.
Medical animation jobs and career opportunities
If you have some skills, and creativity on medical animation then you are expected to earn between $62K to 100K if you can join in a big animation studio in the USA. You can also earn a good amount if you create your own value in this field. It will take some time to create a reputation and brand name as a medical animator. You can start with creating your own website and social profiles (in YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) and uploading your portfolio. You should try to collaborate with the potential medical animation buyers. Profiles in freelancing sites may aid you in this journey. A lot will depend on your marketing skills especially email marketing. You can find out the potential buyers from twitter and linkedin and reach them personally. If you can market well enough then you will end up with selling animations at higher prices. Another potential earning source is creating 3d models and selling those through 3d model selling sites as stated earlier.
Risks of doing medical animation as a freelancer
There are certain risks of medical animator jobs as a freelancer. The most frequent problems we face is fake buyers and a secondary buyer.
- By fake buyer I mean a buyer who will act like a real buyer but in the end, he/she will take the output from you and go away without paying you a single penny. They will make a fake excuse to cancel the order. Freelancing marketplaces are filled up with these types of buyers. In our experience, the worst marketplace for selling medical animation services is Fiverr. Because the Fiverr algorithm and customer service are completely biased towards the buyers. Even if a freelancer does everything right and the buyer wants to cancel the order, Fiverr will cancel and return the full amount to the buyer. I have heard countless times from the Fiverr freelancers that they have worked on a project for 7 days but at the end they got no payment but an order cancellation. Upwork, and freelancer.com are somewhat more neural than Fiverr in this respect.
- A secondary buyer means someone who is not an original buyer but he/she received orders from the original buyer. We have encountered a lot of secondary buyers and even tertiary buyers. The main problems of dealing with this type of buyers are –
- They will try to buy the service at a much lower price than the real price of the service. They do it because they want to generate as much profit as possible by being the middleman.
- Sometimes they come from non-medical backgrounds, as a result, they do not understand what the original buyer wants. It creates a ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication.
How to identify fake buyers and sellers
Fake buyers can be identified by asking detailed questions about the animation project. If the buyer doesn’t know what he wants then he is probably a fake or secondary buyer. They generally tend to be very friendly, talks too much, and try to communicate with you outside freelancing platforms or your own platforms. If you tell them to make a deposit or buy you a required 3d model for the project they would not do it.
Fake sellers can be identified if they do not ask appropriate questions to understand the 3d animation requirements prior to taking orders. They will also fail to show a rich portfolio.
