Guide
Forty minutes of clock, four minutes of decisions
One thirty-second vertical ad, cut from a three-minute take, runs about forty minutes of hands-on work. Two revision rounds turn that into an evening. This page audits where the forty minutes go, step by step. Four of them contain every decision that changes the result. By the end you will know which four, and what it takes to stop paying for the other thirty-six.
- Discrete decisions inside one thirty-second cut
- ~50
- Minutes in the audit that change the result
- 4 of 40
- Longest take the transcript editor accepts
- 3 min
A thirty-second ad is not half the work of a sixty-second one
People estimate editing by output length. That is why the estimates are always wrong. Work scales with the number of separate decisions. A short ad contains more decisions per second, not fewer.
A thirty-second ad might carry twenty cuts, six clip placements and about seventy-five words of captions to verify. That is roughly fifty decisions. Each one is a scrub, a judgement and a click.
Compression is work. Removing the fat is the part that requires taste. A shorter ad often takes longer per second than a longer one.
Count honestly when you run this on your own edit. The minute hunting for the folder. The two minutes waiting for a preview. The six minutes lost to a phone call.
- Ingest, transfer and sync: a few minutes of admin, longer if the file came from someone else's phone.
- Watch the take through twice, marking usable sections. Two passes of three minutes is six minutes minimum.
- Cut the dead air and the false starts. This is the big one and it scales per pause, not per minute.
- Order the surviving lines into an argument that flows.
- Find and place footage. Searching is the expensive half, placing is quick.
- Caption timing and styling, then reading it back for mis-heard words.
- Export, watch the export, fix what you only saw on the export, export again.
The steps, in the order they eat the evening
Two of these contain every creative decision in the edit. The rest is typing, scrubbing and waiting.
Ingest and watch twice
Six minutes before a single cut
Cut dead air
Per pause, not per minute
Order the surviving lines
The first decision that matters
Find and place footage
Searching is the expensive half
Caption timing and check
Per word, no creative upside
Export, watch, export again
You always see it on the export
Two revision rounds cost more clock than building the thing did
Every round trip with a stakeholder adds the fix, the reload, the re-watch and the re-export. Two rounds can cost more time than the original assembly.
A second multiplier only shows up in batches. Editing one ad takes an evening. Editing twelve takes fifteen. By the eighth you are making inconsistent choices about pace and caption style.
Then you go back and redo the earlier ones to match. That consistency work is invisible on a single edit and dominates a batch.
Working editors describe ratios of several hours per finished minute on edit-heavy short-form work. Run the audit with a stopwatch and you can see exactly where those hours are going.
Time your own next batch rather than trusting this one. Three numbers are enough. Minutes on the first ad. Minutes on the eighth. Minutes spent going back to make the first three match the eighth.
That third number is the one nobody expects. On a batch it is usually the largest.
Where forty minutes of a thirty-second edit goes
One audit, one ad. The two longest bars contain no creative decision at all.
- Searching for b-roll15 min
- Cutting dead air11 min
- Caption timing and checks8 min
- Choosing the opening line4 min
- Export and re-export2 min
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Ninety percent of the clock goes on work that does not move the numbers
Two steps dominate for most people and neither is the creative part.
Searching for footage is the first. It is open-ended and it invites browsing. It is where a forty-minute edit becomes a ninety-minute one. Decide which phrases need footage before you look. Then look only for those.
Caption timing is the second. Done by hand it is a per-word chore with no creative upside. Nobody has ever won an auction because their caption timings were hand-tuned.
The parts you should not rush are choosing the opening line and deciding what to cut. Those move the numbers. They are about ten percent of the clock.
Test it on your own last edit. Add up the minutes spent choosing words against the minutes spent dragging clips. The ratio is usually about one to nine.
Four minutes in forty that change the result
The other thirty-six are why you are too tired at 11pm to do the four properly.
Thirty-six of the forty minutes arrive already done
If the first pass arrives assembled, the audit collapses to the two steps that matter. Read the transcript. Decide what stays and what leads.
That is the shape of Cutroom. Upload one take of up to three minutes. It transcribes the read, drafts the edit, finds the footage, times the captions and returns a finished 9:16 MP4.
The searching goes. The dead air goes. The caption timing goes. Those are the three longest bars in the audit above and none of them contained a creative decision.
Changes happen on the transcript. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line you do not want and the cut rebuilds around it. Change the pace and it re-cuts.
Nothing else collapses the whole list in one step. A stock library shortens the search. A caption app shortens the timing. This hands back the finished vertical file with all of it done.
One step stays yours and it decides the ad. Choosing which three minutes to record. No assembly speed rescues a take with no argument in it.
Watch the export on a phone, or the mistake runs for a week
One step should never be automated. Watch the export before it runs anywhere.
Read the captions for a mis-heard product name. Check the first frame is not a blink. Then play it once on a phone at arm's length. Thirty seconds, every time.
The ads that embarrass companies are always the ones nobody watched all the way through.
The facts a buyer needs before the first upload. The source is a person speaking. Three minutes is the ceiling, so an eight-minute ramble gets recorded again rather than trimmed.
Every export is a 9:16 MP4. There is no timeline underneath when a clip lands half a second wrong. You mark a different phrase instead, which is coarser and about thirty-five minutes faster.
Questions people ask
- Does longer source footage make the edit slower?
- Yes, and out of proportion, because the review pass scales with source length while the output stays the same. This is why a three-minute source cap helps rather than hurts. Shoot tight and the edit gets faster before anyone opens a tool.
- How much faster is the second version of the same ad?
- Much faster if you are only changing the opening or the length, because the decisions are already made. Variants of something already assembled are the cheapest creative volume available to anyone.
- What is the single biggest time sink?
- Searching for footage, for most people. It has no natural end point. Deciding in advance which phrases need a visual, and looking only for those, is the highest-return habit in the process.
- Can I skip captions to save time?
- No. A large share of feed viewing happens with sound off, so an uncaptioned ad throws away the viewers who never turn sound on. Automate the timing instead of skipping the captions.
- Who should keep editing by hand?
- Anyone whose value is in the pacing itself. Launch films, founder documentaries, anything with a crew and several cameras. Keep the timeline for those and bring the twelfth vertical variant here.
Thirty-six of those forty minutes are scrubbing, searching and typing. Hand them over and the four that decide the ad are the only ones left.