Dan C. recently asked:
“I’ve taken your FCP training twice (good stuff) and am somewhat adept at getting to a final product, but am stunned by how long it takes from receiving the clips to publishing the movie. I just did a 9 minute family vacation movie with stills and clips and Google earth and drone footage. Took about 7 hours, and I didn’t do color grading or sound effects or anything tricky.
“So, maybe my expectations are way off. What should my expectations be?”
Larry replies: Dan, the only truthful answer is: “It depends….” It’s like asking “How long is a piece of string?” The answer is that piece of string can be as long as you want it to be.
Still, each of us needs to estimate the time required for an editing project – either for ourselves or our clients. So, I’m asking my readers to share their thoughts on estimating editing time for various typical projects.
How long would you tell a client it would take to edit whichever of these projects you have experience with?
What determines the duration? What adds the most time? What advice would you give to an editor “just starting out?”
I truly look forward to your comments. Thanks!
20 Responses to How Long Does It Take to Edit a Video Project?
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Brad stoddard says:
December 9, 2024 at 7:53 am
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Mark Suszko says:
December 9, 2024 at 8:35 am
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Cliff Elliott says:
December 9, 2024 at 3:21 pm
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CHARLOTTE GROSSMAN says:
December 16, 2024 at 10:04 am
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Larry says:
December 16, 2024 at 11:39 am
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Larry Baker says:
December 18, 2024 at 9:21 am
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Larry says:
December 18, 2024 at 9:25 am
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Allen Bronstein says:
December 17, 2024 at 7:57 am
← Older CommentsRemember, a film is never finished, only abandoned.
So if you want to pad my hourly rate to never abandon it, I’m all in.
It’s been a minute since I did wedding videos, but my specialty was a fast turn-around, because I used ENG shooting techniques to “Edit In Camera”, so by the end of the night I could hand off a master recording at the reception, or, more usually, the next day before the couple left on their honeymoon, if I wanted to cut something extra into the service or add some graphics, etc. It’s important to the time estimate to know if the person shooting will also be editing, because in the back of your mind, the editor version of you is telling the shooter version of you, what will be needed to get the job done. Once you sit down to edit, you already have a good idea where all your best material is.
The things I did most in my pro career were news packages, public service spots, documentaries and training videos. Sometimes they let me be extra creative, but more often I was handed a deadline and that shapes how you approach the job.
For PSA’s, it would generally take a day, though one time, we ran twenty legislators through the studio, reading off the prompter, against a basic formulaic template; man, shades of high school yearbook picture day, but I cut those on a Linear A/B roll system into thirty spots over a weekend of 8-hour days. One of those starred a young first-term legislator with a funny name, Barak Obama.
For my news packages, which were generally raw footage packages for video news releases, I would have to record an entire speech by an official, while trying like mad to grab any b-roll available, before, after, or during, single-camera. Had to do a lot of whip-pans to change angles, then trim those few frames out. Back at the shop, I would skim my footage in 2x speed, throwing down markers on the timeline as it spooled, then go back and remove the marked areas to shorten the overall runtime. Because my work would be handed off to various stations where it would be cut into 90-second VOSOTS or less, I tried to make that faceless news editor’s job easy by throwing in a few seconds of establishing shots at the start, then the speech, then additional clips and cut-aways, in a standardized package they could cut in a variety of ways to look unique. Finally I’d slap on overall color correction and some basic sound editing to make it broadcast-legal, and lay it off to tape for the satellite uplink later, or in later days, dump it to an FTP server. For this kind of 15-minute package, I could crank it out in an hour. If I was tasked with making g a complete 90-second story, and I was the original shooter, and thus already knew the material, about an hour and a half, max, including writing and laying down narration.
For “training” films, we had presenters come in to speak while running slides, or I would have to go to some location and record and then clean-up a live presentation to an audience. These were commonly done single-camera, and then the presenter would hand me a file with the powerpoint they’d used, or email it later. We did a LOT of these, and I evolved techniques in shooting for the edit that made the edits go quicker.
The camera moves would always be the same; a series of different framings to punctuate each slide’s information, and what the person was saying about that slide at each point in time. Presenters usually broke each slide down into an opening paragraph, a body statement, and a summary statement. Shoot wide for the opening statement, tight for the major premise of the slide, slow zoom out to a medium shot for the summation statements. This means the camera operator has to actively pay attention to the whole thing when shooting. Back at the shop, you could skim through this at 3x speed and recognize when each slide was going to be changed, so skimming through and dropping in the slides became easy. I did most of those edits in 2x playback speed, with my JKL keys, then audio was fast but clear, and could do a basic, acceptable cut of a two-hour presentation in just one hour.
I took this to a higher level later, bringing along my own personal camcorder and sticks for b-roll shots of the audience and more different framings of the presenter and slides on stage, and a portable video recording hard drive, live-recording the laptop slide output as it fed the house video projector, with sound. Now I had three sources to play with. Four, if I used my iPhone to grab something on the fly in the audience. So when I sat down to edit, I could auto-synch by sound, the presenter, b-roll, and slides as three sources. Final Cut’s auto-synch and multi-cam let me do my skimming and cutting trick in 2x speed with the extra camera shots, so, again, two-hour seminar edited in about an hour. Refining any cuts, color grading, adding titles and lower thirds, about another forty minutes. Done before lunch. The other two guys editing these always took a whole day to edit, sometimes longer, because they only ever just brought the one camera to the presentation, which they typically locked-off on a medium shot of the presenter, and just sat in the audience passively.
These guys did not like to use Multicam and edited their footage at real-time speeds, having to stop and start, hunt for the in and out points of the slide inserts, then killed minutes more on every cut, matching slides to each statement. A very linear process, on non-linear equipment, what we used to call “radio with pictures”. It ticked off a box saying a recording was made, but nobody wanted to watch the boring stuff made that way.
Audiences and clients much preferred my final product because it treated them like a TV audience, with a visual variety and rhythm of image flow that was engaging and made it easy to watch the training and not get bored or lost. And my turn-around time versus the other two guys was a fraction of a day, versus one to two days for “the other guys”. I never understood why they never picked up on my workflow. I think they just didn’t care as much. So the lesson here is that pre-planning how material is captured for the edit can save a lot of time.
These days in retirement, I edit my own music videos, shot on a locked-off wide shot from 4k camera to a 2k timeline, either on a locations or against a green screen in my home office. I re-frame and add faux digital pans and zooms in post. For a three-minute song, There’s usually five to six frame changes with dissolves, this takes two minutes to make and about fifteen to adjust the re-framings to taste, so the edit can be as short as a half-hour. On more elaborate music projects, with a lot of Multicam, compositing, or graphics foreplay going on, I take a day to two days, like my YouTube cut of “Wonderful Christmas Time” where I put myself into a snow globe ornament… that was a LOT of compositing, but when it’s fun, the time flies by.
Over many many years now I have shot and edited weddings, corporate training videos, conventions, documentaries plus lots of school sporting event etc. And I can guarantee a minimum of a 4:1 Ratio for the most basic edits moving on to 10:1 and beyond for the more complex, so 4 hours editing for every one hour shot and 10 for every hour shot.
What non editors don’t get is the amount of planning involved in mapping out an edit. At the lower end if you have personally shot the video you have a reasonable idea what you have but still have to wade through the clips making decisions of what is needed and what is not to tell the story, then at the higher ratio end someone else has shot the video and you have no idea what is there and have to spend a lot of time working out what is important and what is not.
Here is an example, when I shoot family memories I can create edits very quickly as I know what I shot and what I intended to capture but some years ago a man approached me to put together a video for his daughters up and coming 21st birthday and gave me a bag full of old tapes, there were something like 30 tapes from VHS Compacts to Mini DV all with an average of over an hour on each tape. It turned out he was one of those people who had no idea about framing and holding a shot, he would focus on his child for a few second then suddenly move or zoom onto trees the sky etc. As it turned out this edit took forever to find little nuggets of his daughter that were worth watching then stick them altogether into something that would retain the audience attention.
In the end I was able to make a video of about 8 mins long from all of those tapes and it took many days of editing. So as Larry says how long is a piece of string, it depends.
Cliff
When I edited film – I was a documentary film editor for many years in New York – from 1968 until today! with shows on ABC, CBS, Public TV. and NBC etc. – I would often get 150 hours of footage in order to make the final hour for air. I did several sports specials for ABC, and a show that won an Oscar and gave us all EMMYS for NBC. So, how long does it take to screen 150 hours of footage and make logs and notes. To re-screen and pull selects? To begin to see the story come together? Even commercials (2 or 3 days) with client screenings built in, and trailers for features ( I would most often have a month to cut a trailer)
I taught editing for 10 years at a for profit school here in San Francisco for 10 years from age 68-78. The head of the department at that school had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA of what editing was or how important it is to story etc. They though in terms of “just stick it together – how hard can it be…” I taught people who were studying to be producers, camera operators, even editors – I hope I left them with at least a better appreciation for the art and skill of eating. I also ran the negative room at a commercial house, in charge of syncing dailies, lining up lab elements. My hands still shake when I see an upright moviola.
I think you are a wonderful teacher. I read your newsletter all the time. I have just purchased AVID ULTIMATE. I have played around with Premier Pro. I am beginning to see its finer points. I just think AVID is more solid for long work. I have, in the last 5 years taught myself 3D motion control with the online instruction of Richard Harrington. I do it not with photos but with paintings and woodblocks. I would be glad to show you some. They are really quite nice.
Charlotte:
What a lovely note! And a wonderful career – so many useful projects. Screening 150 hours of film for a one-hour project – madness.
Motion control with wood blocks sounds fascinating and a long way out of the ordinary.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Larry
When you have to Shoot, Edit and Write a little documentary it can take quite awhile.
I did TV News for 45 years. You shot it maybe wrote it and had maybe an 2 hours if lucky to get on the air.
I you add effects it can take a time.
There is no set time except the pressure from the air time.
sometimes it is half an hour or less.
Larry:
Smile… News is its own beast. I remember editing the lead story for Channel 5 in LA. They started playback while I was still adding the final three shots.
An act of faith for all concerned.
Larry
Thank you Larry! 👍. I’ve been a fan since 2000 and look forward to each new episode.