AI Editing
The Cost of an 8-Hour Edit (and How to Get It to 12 Minutes)
An eight-hour manual edit costs more than the editor's time on the clock. Here's where that time actually goes, and what changes when an agentic editor does the first pass.
Where an eight-hour edit actually goes
An eight-hour edit is rarely eight hours of cutting. Most of it is upstream: importing and organizing footage, watching everything to find the usable takes, re-watching to compare options, and only then building a timeline. The actual creative cutting — the part that needed a human's judgment — is a smaller fraction of the total than people usually assume.
What changes when an agent does the first pass
An agentic editor removes the upstream hours specifically, because it can watch and index footage far faster than a human review pass, and it can make first-draft editorial decisions about what belongs in the story. In practice, teams using Broll take an edit that took about eight hours by hand down to around twelve minutes of the agent's time, before a human review pass.
The cost isn't just editor hours
Eight hours per edit also caps how much content a team can realistically produce — every video competes for the same limited editor time, which means projects get queued, deadlines slip, and some footage never gets used at all. Cutting the time-per-edit doesn't just save money on that one video; it changes how much a team can publish in total.