Ask a video team whether it’s busy and you get two answers. The editors say they’re drowning. The owner looks at the month’s invoices and wonders where all those hours went.
Both can be true at once, and the number that sorts it out is utilization, the share of the team’s available hours that went to client work.
Agencies use it to set prices and to decide when to hire. A video team has to adjust the definitions a little, because its month includes shoot days and revision rounds that land whenever the client gets to them.
In short
- Utilization is client hours divided by available hours, which are paid hours minus holidays, vacation and sick days.
- Starting ranges: 70 to 80% for editors, 55 to 70% for producers and shooters, 25 to 45% for an owner who sells.
- 100% leaves no room for the next round of notes, a moved shoot or a sick day.
- On fixed-price work, rounds past the quote keep utilization up while they eat the margin.
- Read it for the whole team once a month to price and hire, not to rank people.
The formula, and what goes on each side
utilization = client hours
÷ available hours
Available hours are the hours each person is paid to work in the period, minus public holidays, vacation and sick days. Leave meetings and admin in, along with the quiet afternoon between jobs. That time is what the number is supposed to show you.
Client work is anything done for a specific job:
| Activity | Client work? |
|---|---|
| Shoot day, from load-in to wrap | Yes |
| Prepping and packing gear for that shoot | Yes |
| Edit, color, mix, graphics, exports | Yes |
| Revision rounds | Yes |
| Calls and emails about a project | Yes |
| Gear maintenance not tied to a job | No |
| Internal meetings, backups, admin | No |
| Pitches, proposals, the studio’s reel | No |
Some cases are arguable, like the drive to a location. Pick a rule and keep it, so one month compares with the next. Logging the hours is covered in time tracking for video editors.
You’ll also see billable utilization, which counts only the hours a client pays for. With hourly billing it matches plain utilization. On fixed-price work they can drift apart, as the section on revision rounds shows.
A worked example for a four-person team
Take a month with 22 working days and one public holiday. That leaves 21 days, or 168 hours for someone on an eight-hour day.
| Person | Available | Client hours | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner and director | 168 | 59 | 35% |
| Producer (2 days off) | 152 | 99 | 65% |
| Editor | 168 | 126 | 75% |
| Shooter-editor (1 sick day) | 160 | 104 | 65% |
| Team | 648 | 388 | 60% |
The team rate is total client hours over total available hours: 388 ÷ 648 is 60%. The owner’s 35% isn’t a problem, since selling and running the company fill most of the rest.
This feeds straight into pricing. If the studio costs $29,100 a month, each client hour costs $29,100 ÷ 388 = $75. At 65%, about 33 more client hours, the same costs come to roughly $69 an hour.
The post on how to price video production picks it up from there.
Realistic targets by role
I haven’t found a published benchmark for video studios that holds up. The closest reference is SPI Research’s 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, which put average billable utilization at 68.9%, under the 75% its authors call the optimal threshold.
That survey covers professional services in general. A video team has long shoot days and gear to prep and return, so its numbers vary more from one studio to another.
The ranges below are starting points from practice. Replace them after two or three months of your own data.
| Role | Starting range |
|---|---|
| Editor, colorist, motion designer | 70 to 80% |
| Producer or project manager | 55 to 70% |
| Shooter or DP who also edits | 55 to 70% |
| Owner who sells and directs | 25 to 45% |
Shooters swing the most, because shoots come in clusters and a quiet week pulls the month down. Put together, these ranges land a small studio somewhere between 55 and 70% for the team.
Why 100% is the wrong goal
A team at 100% has no hours left for anything that wasn’t in the plan, and video work always brings something: a third round of notes, a client who moves the shoot, a rush cutdown for social, an editor home sick.
Each one lands on a week that was already full, and you pay for it in overtime or in a delivery that slips.
Internal work stops too. Nobody updates the reel or learns what changed in the edit software, and a year later the studio is slower than it was.
The number also stops being honest. If people feel 100% is expected, timers keep running on client tasks through lunch, and utilization climbs while telling you less.
For editors, 80% is about where things start to creak. That’s 6.4 hours a day of client work, and the rest goes to email, files and whatever nobody planned.
How revision rounds eat into it
Rounds count as client work, so on paper they push utilization up. Underneath, they do two kinds of damage.
They arrive on the client’s schedule. The editor sends v2 on Tuesday and the notes come back the next Monday. If nothing else is ready to cut in between, those days pull utilization down while everyone feels busy.
On a fixed price, rounds beyond the quote are client hours nobody pays for. Go back to the editor at 75%. Say the quotes for that month’s projects set aside 16 hours for rounds, and the rounds took 34.
Utilization still reads 126 ÷ 168 = 75%. Counting only the hours the quotes covered, it’s 108 ÷ 168 = 64%. Those 18 extra hours look like productive time in one number and show up as a loss in the margin.
So read hours against the estimate next to utilization. Often cutting down revision rounds frees more capacity than a new hire would.
Use it for pricing and hiring, not for watching people
Utilization is a planning number. Read it for the whole team once a month, and wait for a quarter’s trend before acting on it.
If the team stays above about 80% for three months and rounds keep piling up, you’re short a person. A freelancer on the busiest stage is the cheap way to test that.
If it stays under about 55% for a quarter, the gap is in sales or pricing, and another salary makes it worse.
To size a hire, divide the client hours that don’t fit by what one person adds: an editor at 75% brings about 126 a month. How long it takes to edit a video turns hours into videos.
It turns into surveillance when you read it per person, per week, in front of everyone. Don’t rank people by it or bring it to performance reviews.
An editor at 55% might be the one training the new hire, or the one waiting on a client who went quiet. When someone’s number looks off, ask them privately about the work they had that month.
Count the owner too. Leaving those hours out makes the team rate look higher than the studio really is.
How this works in RecReview
RecReview doesn’t calculate utilization. It has no billable flag, no rates and no setting for available hours, so the division happens in your spreadsheet. It records the top of the fraction from the timer, so nobody has to remember it.
The timer runs on a task or a video, one per person at a time, and every session records the phase the task was in.
In Metrics, which only owners and admins see, the Hours logged chart groups hours by client, project, phase or person for any period you pick, such as last month. Hours on tasks with no client get their own No client bar, so internal work you choose to time stays apart from client hours.
The Team tab has the team-wide views:
- Team’s day lays every timer session on one clock, colored by client.
- Team activity shows each person’s hours per day, or per week over longer periods, with a total.
- Team productivity lists each person’s hours, days worked and average hours per day, and a click on a name opens that person’s days and where the time went, task by task.
- Team capacity looks ahead: active tasks, next deadline and, when tasks have estimates, the hours left on them.
Holidays and time off live in your calendar, not in RecReview. On a paid Studio plan, the public API lists every timer session for the sheet where you do the math. The analytics and time tracking pages have more.
