Key takeaways:
AI makes it faster and easier for anyone to edit video
Automated editing replaces mundane tasks
AI can save dozens of hours and thousands of dollars per project

Artificial intelligence makes for fast, easy video editing. If you’ve been paying attention to the newer uses of AI in video creation, this doesn’t come as a surprise.

In fact, we’ve gone deep on the topic of AI video editing in previous pieces of content. But the big question on the mind of video teams and business executives alike is, “How much of an ROI can we get from AI?”

Fast and easy video editing has a major impact on the entire creative process.

Since editing is often the long pole in the tent of video creation, less time on editing often means teams can create more content — and there’s a cost-saving associated with those efficiency gains.

Video teams will produce an ROI by leveraging automation in video editing.

Fast, easy video editing with AI

The fact that AI makes video editing faster and easier is huge for businesses looking to make more video.

Many companies have stated that video content takes too long and too much money to create. Often editing stands in the way of executing a video-first strategy.

Traditional editing is too expensive and takes too much time.

You could throw people at the problem, either by hiring extra hands or outsourcing editing.

Well, as we’ve covered in other pieces, agency fees alone can add thousands to the cost of creating each video.

If you could add to your team without increasing costs, then you’d see some time savings. Therefore, your cost per video produced would drop. That’s pretty easy to understand.

But that doesn’t really solve the time problem. With increased demand, it becomes harder to maintain the same pace of output.

So this is where speeding up the editing process trumps throwing extra hands at the problem.

How automated video editing saves time

AI makes a true difference in its scalability. Powerful AI-driven platforms work the same, no matter if you need to edit five videos or 500.

AI does many of the redundant, mundane tasks of editing so no person has to. Things like captioning, creating video descriptions, color correcting, and removing those “umms” and long pauses from recordings are done in an instant.

This means your video team can focus on ideating and overseeing projects, not sitting in a dark room trying to catch the subtle differences between each camera source.

Professional-quality video made scalable

The easiest way to make video creation scalable is to raise the floor.

Make it so that everyone is capable of recording and editing content, rather than having a small group of video creators. This places an entire organization at your disposal — even though video creation isn’t their day job.

The goal is to make the entire process more efficient and make it so that everyone, from a veteran financial advisor to a thought leader proficient in new media, is self-sufficient.

The video experts in the room are elevated to content managers rather than content producers. The video experts set up a framework and provide guidance; your self-sufficient creators contribute their portion, and then the AI does the dirty work. Plus, the video team maintains control throughout to ensure every video is pristine every time.

It’s a much more efficient way forward.

Automated editing vs. traditional editing: a cost breakdown

The opaque “fast and easy” video editing moniker doesn’t mean much without an understanding of how a given platform produces those time savings and the associated costs.

Here’s a breakdown of how different components of an AI-powered video editing platform compare to the traditional editing process.

Captions and transcripts

Traditional editing: It’s generally accepted that manually creating captions and transcripts takes about five minutes per minute of video.

AI video editor: AI can automatically generate caption and transcript files. Realistically, you’ll want to double-check the V1 to make sure brand names, peoples’ names, and the like are accurate. A conservative estimate is about one minute per minute of video.

Text-based editing vs. timeline editing

Traditional editing: A traditional timeline video editor, depending on who is using it, ranges between 30 minutes and one hour to edit one minute of video. We’ll split the difference at 45 minutes to edit each minute of video.

AI video editor: A text-based editor, where you alter the transcript and move words around rather than looking at still images and an audio wavelength, is an estimated five to 10 times faster than a timeline editor. To make it a round number on the more conservative side, that’s about 10 minutes per minute of video.

Video summaries and chapters

Traditional editing: While it may not take as much time to create a description of the video as a transcript, it still requires you to watch the full video. Even if the editor is quick, this is at least one minute per minute of video.

AI video editor: The AI uses the same automatically generated transcript to create a video description. We’ll leave a little time for a quality check, but to edit less than 100 words, this is about one minute total.

Disfluency removal

Traditional editing: This is heavily dependent on the content of the video. There’s about a 50% chance for disfluency in a sentence of 10-15 words. Meaning, about five to seven edits per minute of video. At 30 seconds per edit to remove the stumble and patch the video together, this is about 2.5X per minute of video.

AI video editor: Most AI video tools will automatically remove those “umms” and “likes” in an instant. You may choose to leave it up to the machine to apply each edit. Many video pros won’t like that. One minute per minute of video to review all the changes.

Color correction

Traditional editing: Inexperienced editors might not even think to look for inconsistent color profiles or assess how cold or warm the picture is. Unfortunately, this is tedious work that freelancers estimate takes two hours per minute of video.

AI video editor: AI will read the color profiles and match them across clips or provide a few options for the “look” you desire. Everything will be applied at the click of a button, which requires no time at all.

Adding graphics, branding, and logos

Traditional video editing: It might seem like a small addition, but adding a logo, a branded frame, a pre-roll, an outro, and lower thirds all take time. These are very quick edits that require no more than 30 seconds per minute of video.

AI video editor: Automated video editing tools make this incredibly easy. If you have a template set up with name tags and appropriate branding enabled, everything is applied in an instant.

Final tally

To get to a final figure, let’s provide a quick sample scenario. The project is to create a five-minute video. The recordings were already created and organized, and branding elements were provided. So, the only thing being outsourced is the hands-on editing.

Freelancer fees range from as cheap as $5 per hour for a novice to well over $150 per hour for a professional. Assuming you want an experienced editor who will give you great quality without the need for revisions, let’s set the figure at $100 per hour of video editing work.

Traditional editing: (5 x 5 mins captioning) + (5 x 45 mins editing) + (5 x 1 min descriptions) + (5 x 2.5 mins disfluency removal) + (5 x 120 mins color correction) + (5 x 0.5 mins branding) = 14.5 hours, $1,450 per project

AI video editor: (5 x 1 min caption review) + (5 x 10 mins editing) + (1 min description review) + (5 x 1 min disfluency review) + (0 mins color correction) + (0 mins branding) = 61 minutes

Of course, this is just to give you an idea of what’s possible with AI. Outsourced video editing can take around 15 hours and cost nearly $1,500 per video in this scenario, while AI powers an in-house team to get to the same result in about an hour.

If you’re a large company with enterprise demands like VMware, which compiles hundreds of videos in each project, you can see how streamlining the creation process can produce more than $100,000 in cost savings.

Automated video editing creates massive ROI

Automated video editing streamlines a labor-intensive process, keeps costs down, and empowers teams to create more video content without an additional spend.

These time and cost savings are only multiplied by creating video in a seamless, end-to-end workflow from recording to editing and then sending content to its endpoint.

Even if your team isn’t ready to completely automate the editing process, at Socialive we’re more than happy to help guide creators of all levels of experience through the shifting landscape.

To see how AI video editing works, take a look at our recorded demo of the Editor.