To answer your question Rob, yes you would charge by the hour for the whole project, not just for the finished product. Like Shawn said, you don't know where the good bits are if you don't look at everything to find them. Even when you are the person that shot the footage you still look at everything because you don't remember what you shot until you get back in and look at it.
Here in lies the problem, most of us Drone guys are not professional photographers or cinematographers, we are just guys and girls out flying drones, having fun, and running video of everything we see and thinking it is the greatest footage in the world. Truth of the matter is our video is not that great to anyone but us. Not saying everything we take is horrible, but the fact is that most of it is and we have to take a lot bad stuff to find the small nuggets of good stuff.
The second problem we have is most of us are trying to learn from professionals and it just isn't working out real well. Reason why? Because professionals (for the most part) assume that we should all learn to do things exactly the way they do them. But why should we unless we aspire to be professionals ourselves? I like the pictures I take, my kids like my pictures, my wife likes my pictures, heck I haven't had anyone tell me that any of the pictures I have taken are bad. Does it mean I am a great photographer? No not really, it just means I take several hundred shots of each subject, pick the best ones that I can tweak to make better, and never let the others see the light of day. It is the world of digital photography and it is fun. I enjoy the way I take photographs and video because I don't spend the majority of my time trying to figure out what settings, what ISO, what fStop, what shutter speed or trying to make sure every composition adheres to the rule of thirds. I just snap away as many shots as I can and tweak the settings here or there after previewing so I don't spend all my time worrying about whether it is all good or not. I want to spend the majority of my time seeing things around me with my own two eyes rather than from behind a piece of glass. The photos I take are just to remind me of what I really saw because you can never EVER capture a moment on film or digitally that represents exactly what you saw or what you felt in the moment. I used to think you had to photograph things a certain way. I learned photography from professionals in the days of film, when we only had 24 or 36 exposures on a roll to get it right, and you could only fix minor exposure issues in the darkroom. I have never called myself a professional photographer, but I have taken a lot of photos and video over the years, put it all together in photo montages, or in short videos and made a few thousand dollars off of them as a hobby. I actually have made better money editing other people's photos and video, although I still consider myself an amateur and even though I have gotten paid, I would never call myself a professional.
But it is a new day and unless you aspire to be a professional photographer, videographer or cinematographer, then why worry about all the details, just fly where you want (within the law and rules set forth), how you want, and make sure the record button is on the whole time. The footage you get is only to remind you of the experience, or for you to share with family and friends. Watching videos made by professionals, trying to teach you how to get better footage or how to storyboard your video or how to make shot lists, is great, it gives you ideas on how you can improve. But for the most part you will sit there watching 15 or 30 minutes of a video on YouTube and walk away with more questions than answers. You also will spend a lot of time flying, trying to get that perfect shot, and not experience the fun you have in just flying.
As far as editing your footage? You can do it! Anyone can. As long as you don't think "we" as drone pilots and amateur photographers are going to take our mostly bad, but sometimes decent video and turn it into a cinematic viral video on youtube. And by the same token we can't expect to hand our hours of video over to a professional or semi professional editor and expect them to turn it into a hollywood production. The only way to do that is to spend a lot of time learning every aspect of photography and videography and taking the best footage we possibly can in camera. But if all you want is something decent to share with family and friends then you most definitely can piece together something decent of any footage you take and smile from ear to ear when you share it someone else.
I have had a few people pushing me to start a vlog and share some things with them and I just couldn't figure out what I really wanted to do or how I wanted to do it, but I think this thread has given me some good ideas and maybe in the next month or so I can start piecing some things together and posting. It definitely won't turn me into an overnight YouTube sensation, but maybe it will help some of you that just want to piece some things together for your own enjoyment, and not have to sift through a ton of technical jargon that you won't really ever use. to be continued.....