“How long does it take to edit a three-minute video?” comes up on client calls and in every studio’s Monday planning, and the internet has answers.
Veedyou, an editing service, says an experienced editor needs 45 to 60 minutes per finished minute. On the same page it puts a three- to four-minute music video at 40 to 50 hours, which is more than ten hours a minute.
When the editor and trainer Larry Jordan asked his readers in 2024, he opened by comparing the question to asking how long a piece of string is. The replies ran from an hour or so for a news story to a one-hour documentary cut from about 150 hours of footage.
All of those numbers are true for somebody. None of them tells you how long your next video will take, because a figure per finished minute hides what actually uses up the hours. Those you can estimate now and measure later.
In short
- A rate per finished minute hides what actually uses up the hours, so it can’t tell you how long your next video will take.
- Footage to watch, the number of sources, how much story has to be found, finishing and revision rounds drive editing time.
- Estimate by adding up the stages: setup, logging, assembly, rough cut, rounds and finishing.
- Read an editor’s capacity in hours, not in videos per week.
- Measure your own numbers by video type for four to six weeks, using the median and keeping the first cut and the rounds apart.
What drives editing time
Footage comes first. Someone has to watch everything that was shot at least once before they can cut it, so a three-minute video made from four hours of interview starts with four hours of viewing, and more if the editor stops to take notes.
The ratio of footage to finished minutes says more about the job than the finished length does.
Then the number of sources. One camera and a voiceover take minutes to set up. Two cameras to sync, a separate audio recorder, b-roll from three different days and stock footage each add time to bring in and to search through later, and so does hunting for music.
Story matters next. With an approved script, the edit follows the page. When the story has to be found in the edit, as in most interview and documentary work, assembly turns into writing, and writing is slow.
A paper edit moves part of that work onto a transcript, where it goes faster.
Finishing covers graphics, color and sound. A cut with lower thirds from a template and a logo at the end is a different job from one with animated titles, a full grade and a proper mix. Every delivery format adds an export and another watch to check it.
Revision rounds multiply everything after the first cut. Two rounds of small notes take a few hours, while a round that changes the structure is close to a second edit.
The last factor is how organized the material is when it arrives. Clips named, logged and synced on ingest save an afternoon of searching through C0001.MP4 to C0412.MP4 later.
Estimate it stage by stage
Instead of multiplying the finished length by a rate, add up the stages:
hours = setup + logging
+ assembly + rough cut
+ rounds + finishing
Setup is ingest, backup, sync and proxies. Logging is watching the footage and pulling selects.
Assembly puts them in order, and the rough cut turns that into the first version the client sees. Rounds are hours per round times the rounds you expect, and finishing is color, mix, graphics, captions and exports.
Here’s how that adds up for two common jobs. The social cut comes from an interview the team already shot and logged for a longer piece. The interview video starts from a 75-minute interview on two cameras plus an hour of b-roll.
The hours are an example to show the method, so swap in your own.
| Stage | 60 s social cut | 3 min interview video |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | 0.5 | 1 to 2 |
| Logging and selects | 0.5 to 1 | 3 to 5 |
| Assembly | 0.5 to 1 | 3 to 4 |
| Rough cut to first cut | 1 to 2 | 4 to 8 |
| Revision rounds | 0.5 to 1 (one) | 3 to 6 (two) |
| Finishing | 1 to 1.5 | 4 to 6 |
| Total hours | 4 to 7 | 18 to 31 |
Per finished minute, the social cut comes to 4 to 7 hours and the interview video to about 6 to 10. The short one costs more per minute because setup, captions and exports don’t shrink with the length.
Both land far above the 45-to-60-minute rule, partly because that rule leaves rounds out (Veedyou adds each revision on top, at 10 to 25 percent of the time spent on the first cut).
Those are hours of work. On the calendar the video takes longer, because the editor juggles other jobs and each version waits on the client for a while. Our post on the video production timeline deals with that side.
How many videos an editor can edit in a week
Work it out in hours first. An editor paid for 40 hours a week doesn’t spend 40 of them cutting client work: meetings, backups, admin and the odd quiet morning take a share.
Say 30 hours go to client edits. With the table above, that’s one to almost two interview videos a week (30 ÷ 31 and 30 ÷ 18), or four to seven social cuts (30 ÷ 7 and 30 ÷ 4).
A real week mixes types, and few videos start and finish inside the same week. Two can be waiting on the client while a third is in the edit.
That’s why capacity reads better in hours than in videos. Add up the hours still to go on everything assigned to a person and compare that with the hours they have before the next deadline.
A weekly quota from a job post or from another studio’s website comes from another team’s footage and clients, and it says little about how long your own videos take.
Measure your own numbers
Your real numbers come from a few weeks of tracked time, and our post on time tracking for video editors covers how to log it.
- Group videos by type, whatever your studio makes most of: social cuts, interview videos, event recaps. A 60-second cut and a 3-minute film should never share an average.
- Count finished videos. A video edited across three weeks belongs in the number once, with all its hours, after it’s delivered. Dividing this month’s hours by the videos someone touched this month mixes half-done jobs with finished ones. Over a few months that evens out, but for a number per type, use the total on each delivered video.
- Use the median. One job where the client rewrote the script after the first cut can drag an average around for months.
- Keep the first cut and the rounds apart. When rounds take more hours than the first cut, cutting down revision rounds will usually free more capacity than editing faster.
Give it four to six weeks, then compare the estimate with the actual hours on every job as it closes. The same hours feed your quotes, and how to price video production shows how to turn them into a price.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview the timer runs on a task or a video, one per person at a time, and each session records the phase the task was in. Hours come only from the timer, so nobody types them in or edits them afterwards.
Each task shows its total, each person’s hours and, if you set an estimate, how much of it is used. When you set one, RecReview suggests a figure: the median of the hours logged on other tasks in the same project.
The Table view shows each video’s length next to the hours worked on its task. Filter it to finished tasks and group it by project or client, and you can read hours per finished video job by job.
Owners and admins also get Metrics. The Production tab shows average hours per video, post-production hours per video and hours spent against the estimate, each compared with the previous period of the same length.
The average divides the hours logged in the period by the videos that got time in it. The client and project filters narrow it to one kind of work.
The Team tab has two tables. Team productivity gives each person’s hours, tasks done, videos worked on and hours per video for the period, and flags sessions of 12 hours or more as a timer someone probably forgot.
Team capacity looks ahead: each person’s active tasks, their next deadline, how many are overdue or waiting on the client and, when tasks have estimates, the hours left on them. Click a person to see their tasks in the table.
There’s no export screen. The analytics and time tracking pages have more.
