Ask an editor on Friday how long the brand film took this week and you’ll get a confident “about twelve hours”.
It’s a reconstruction that keeps the long afternoon on the assembly and loses the twenty minutes on the phone about the logo, the three exports for different formats and the hour spent hunting for a music track.
A studio needs those hours to decide what to charge for the next project and whether the team has room to take it on. The posts on how to price video production and the budget template both start from measured hours.
This one is about measuring them in a way the team keeps up after the first week.
In short
- End-of-day timesheets round long blocks up and small interruptions to zero, so the split between jobs comes out wrong.
- Run one timer per person on each video while you work, and let the tool stamp the stage.
- Log calls, emails and exports on the video they’re about, and keep revision rounds apart from the first cut.
- Check weekly for forgotten timers, look monthly at hours by client and stage, and compare actual hours with the estimate when a project closes.
- Time the work on each video, leave people’s screens alone and go through the totals with the team.
Why the end-of-day timesheet comes out wrong
Memory rounds. A session that ran from 2:10 to 3:40 becomes “the afternoon”, and the 15-minute call that cut it in half disappears.
Long blocks get rounded up and small interruptions get rounded down to zero, so the daily total can look about right while the split between jobs is wrong.
Context switching makes it worse. A post-production day rarely stays on one video. The editor exports a cut for one client, answers notes on another, uploads a third and goes back to the first.
At 7 p.m. that day gets written down as “mostly the brand film”, and the two smaller jobs look cheaper than they were. Fill in the whole week on Friday and the errors pile up before the number ever reaches a quote.
Put the timer on the task
A timer running while you work beats careful recall if it’s set up well. Run it on each video, or on each deliverable when one video has several cuts.
A timer on the whole project tells you the project took 60 hours. A timer per video tells you the four 30-second cutdowns took half of them.
Keep one timer running per person, so moving to another job means moving the timer.
Each session also needs a stage (pre-production, shoot, edit, revisions, finishing or project management), and nobody picks a stage from a dropdown at 6 p.m. If your tool already knows which phase each task is in, let it stamp the stage for you.
People stop using a timer that takes more than one click to start, so it has to live where the work already happens, on the board or on the review page.
What counts and what doesn’t
Decide once, write it down and share it, so everyone logs the same way.
| Activity | Log it? | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Edit to the first cut | Yes | The video |
| Revision rounds | Yes, apart from the first cut | The video |
| Calls and emails about notes | Yes | The video they’re about |
| Exports and uploads | Yes, while you’re on them | The video |
| A long render you walk away from | No, the timer goes with you | Whatever you do next |
| Internal meetings, backups, pitches | No | Overhead, in your cost per hour |
Calls and emails are the hours quotes most often miss, so log them on the video they’re about.
For renders, the timer goes wherever the editor goes. If you sit and watch an export to check it, that’s work on the job. If you start a two-hour render and switch to another project, the timer switches too.
Revisions get their own bucket because they answer a pricing question. Count everything after the first cut reaches the client as revision time, either with a subtask per round or by noting when the first version went out.
Overhead stays off client jobs but still costs money, which is why your cost per hour comes out higher than salaries divided by hours worked.
The forgotten timer
Someone will leave at 7 p.m. with the timer running, and the next morning it will read fourteen hours. The opposite happens too, when an editor works for two hours and only notices the timer at lunch.
Stop the timer as you get up for lunch or a meeting, while it’s on your mind, and keep the running timer somewhere you can see it as you work.
When it happens anyway, make a note the same day, while everyone remembers what really went on, and in the weekly look check for sessions longer than any real workday before reading anything else.
If one person forgets every week, the timer is probably in the wrong place for the way they work, and it’s worth asking them where it would be easier to reach.
How often to look, and what to read
- Ten minutes a week catches missing days and forgotten timers.
- Once a month, look at hours by client and by stage.
- When a project closes, put the actual hours next to the estimate for each stage, so the next quote starts from what happened.
The most useful comparison is the edit against the revisions. If the rounds take more hours than the first cut, the problem is usually upstream, in the brief or in how notes reach the editor, and cutting down revision rounds will save more than editing faster.
Hours per client come next. Two clients can pay the same for the same kind of video while one of them needs twice the calls and three extra rounds.
With the hours in hand, you can price that client’s next job properly or talk to them about how they send notes. Just wait for a handful of similar projects first, since one disastrous job can drag an average around for months.
Keep it from feeling like surveillance
Editors resent time tracking when it feels like a way to catch them out. Say what the numbers are for before you start: pricing work so the studio doesn’t lose money on it, and knowing whether there’s room for the next job.
Time the work on each video and leave people’s screens alone. A timer on a video says how long the video took. Screenshots and activity monitors measure how busy someone looked and tell the team it isn’t trusted.
Go through the totals with the team once a month. Editors usually know why a job ran long.
When one person’s hours on a video look high, ask about the job first. A messy brief or a client who rewrote the script after the first cut explains most long edits.
And the owner logs time too, since the hours spent on calls and sales are part of what a project costs.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview the timer belongs to a task or a video. You start it from a card on the kanban or in the video grid, from a row in the table view, or inside the task, where each subtask has its own timer that counts toward the parent task.
Each person runs one timer at a time, so starting a new one stops the last. The running timer stays at the top of the app and of the review page with a button to stop it, and the Mac app also shows it in the menu bar.
With the built-in automations on, starting a timer moves a task in To start to In progress, and a task in the Planned phase to Pre-production.
Every session records the phase the task was in. The task shows the total, each person’s hours and, if you set an estimate, how much of it is used.
In the task’s activity history, timer sessions sit in the same timeline as each new version, each send to the client and each request for changes, so you can see how much work came after the first cut went out.
Owners and admins also get Metrics, with hours by client, project, phase or person, average hours per video, post-production hours per video and actual hours against the estimate.
The team’s day lays every session on one clock, colored by client, and any session of 12 hours or more is flagged as a timer someone probably forgot.
Hours can’t be typed in or edited by hand, so a forgotten timer stays in the totals with that flag on it. RecReview doesn’t store rates or create invoices, and there’s no export screen.
On a paid Studio plan, the public API lists every session if you want the raw hours in a spreadsheet. The time tracking and analytics pages have more.
