How long does it take to edit a video?
A practical rule of thumb: 30–60 minutes of editing per finished minute for a standard YouTube video, and 15–45 minutes for a short-form clip. A 10-minute video is genuinely a 5–8 hour edit for a careful solo creator — most of it in cutting, not effects.
Where the time actually goes: reviewing footage and cutting dead air (~half the total), captions and titles, then music, effects, and export. The biggest speedups are one-click auto captions (an hour saved per video, easily), motion presets instead of hand-keyframing, and batch-editing several videos in one sitting rather than context-switching every day.
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