A short form reel, the 15 to 60 second vertical video you post to TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, usually takes us 1 to 2 hours of editing time. That covers finding the moment, cutting it tight, captions, sound and export. The number moves with how much footage we have to search, how many graphics you want and how many revision rounds it goes through.
Where do the hours go?
Most people picture the cutting. The cutting is the fast part.
Selects come first: watching the footage and marking the usable takes. With five minutes of clean phone footage, that takes minutes. With a 90 minute podcast, it can eat the first hour on its own.
Then the hook. The first two seconds decide whether anyone watches the rest, so we try several opening lines and cuts before we commit. After that comes pacing: removing breaths, filler words and dead air, and punching in on the frame to keep the picture moving.
The hook often takes longer than the rest of the edit combined.
Captions, sound and color finish it. Auto captions get you close, but someone has to fix names, line breaks and timing. Then we level the audio, add music if it fits, apply a LUT (a preset color look) or a quick correction, and export at 1080 by 1920.
What makes a short take longer?
The same 30 second reel can be a one hour job or a four hour job. These are the usual reasons it climbs:
- Long source footage. Searching a 90 minute recording for the best 40 seconds is mostly watching time.
- Multiple cameras that need syncing and switching.
- Custom graphics. Animated text, lower thirds (on screen name titles) or motion graphics built from scratch instead of from a template.
- B roll that has to be found, licensed or pulled from your library.
- Messy audio: echo, wind, a clip on mic rubbing against a shirt.
- No brief, so the editor guesses tone and length, then redoes it.
- Vague revisions.
That last one matters most. A time coded note like "0:04, cut the second sentence" takes five minutes to fix. "Make it pop more" can cost another full pass.
A 30 second video can hide three hours of work if it starts as a 90 minute recording.
Is editing time the same as turnaround?
No, and mixing the two up causes most of the frustration we hear about past editors. Editing time is hands on work. Turnaround is when the draft lands in your inbox, and it depends on the editor's queue.
A reel might take 90 minutes to cut and still arrive two days later. At Crispy Edits, turnaround runs 24 to 96 hours depending on plan, while the editing itself sits in the range above. When you compare editors, ask for both numbers separately.
Also ask what counts toward the time. Some editors include revisions, some count only the first cut. If you post one clip to several platforms, ask whether exporting extra aspect ratios is included.
How do you get shorts edited faster?
Most of the time you can save happens before the editor opens the footage.
Send timestamps. If you know the best moment in your podcast is at 34:10, say so, and selects drop from an hour to ten minutes. Add one reference reel you like, so the editor matches a style instead of inventing one.
Lock your look once. Pick a caption font, colors, logo placement and an opening style, then reuse them. The first reel in a new style is slow; the tenth in the same style is fast.
Batch the work. Five shorts from one long recording cost less time per short than five shorts from five shoots, because the editor watches the source once. That is the strongest case for repurposing long recordings.
Give consolidated feedback: one reviewer, one round, time coded comments in Frame.io or a similar tool. Two people sending conflicting notes on separate days doubles the work.
Budget short form edits by the source footage and the graphics, not by the length of the finished video. Do the brief, the timestamps and the style decisions up front, and each reel stays at the low end of the range.
