How many clips do we get?

Whatever number is written in the agreement, and the number is written before anything starts. It specifies the count, the length range, how many aspect ratios, how many revisions per clip, and the rate for anything beyond it. Vague volume is the fastest way for a retainer to sour for both sides, so we make it boring and specific up front.

Do you choose the clips or do we?

Either, and they are priced differently because selection is a separate skill. If you send timestamps, we cut to them. If you send a two hour recording and want the moments found, that is editorial work — transcribing, reading, judging what will hold attention — and it appears as its own line rather than being absorbed silently.

What happens if our footage is late?

Delivery moves by the same amount, and that is agreed in advance rather than negotiated in the moment. The cycle only works because each stage is batched on a fixed day. Footage arriving two days late does not compress into the same week — it shifts the week. Saying this at the start prevents the argument that otherwise happens in month two.

Can every clip look different?

It can, but you should not want it to. The retainer works because one template — caption font, size, colour, position, hook style, intro and outro frames, audio levels — is built once and reused. That is what makes consistent output affordable and what makes your feed look like one brand. Restyling every clip is project work priced as project work.

How do you know the edits are any good?

By retention rather than views. The measure we ask for is average view duration divided by clip length, because that tells you whether people stayed. A drop at three seconds points at the hook. A drop around fifteen seconds points at a slack passage in the middle that should have been cut. Views tell you about reach, not about the edit.

What if we want to stop?

Give notice at the end of a billing month and the queue is cleared and delivered. You keep everything already produced. We are not interested in holding anyone in a retainer they have stopped getting value from — if the volume is wrong, the honest move is usually to resize it rather than cancel.

Video, Audio & Media Production

Monthly video editing capacity, on a fixed rhythm

A set number of edits every month on a schedule you can plan around — long-form cutdowns and short vertical clips, produced in batches from a locked template.

From: $400–$4,000/mo
Typical time: ongoing
Usually bought by: Creators, agencies

What this actually solves

The person buying this has a publishing rhythm they cannot maintain. A podcast every week, a webinar every month, a founder who records constantly, and a backlog of raw footage that is worth something only if somebody cuts it.

They have already tried the alternatives. Doing it themselves works for three weeks and then stops. Hiring per project means a new brief, a new quote and a new negotiation every single time, for work that is fundamentally the same work. Rotating through freelancers means re-explaining the brand every month and receiving output that never quite matches.

What they are actually buying is not video. It is the removal of a recurring decision from their week. Once the footage goes into the folder, they stop thinking about it, and on a known day the finished clips come back. That is why reliability outperforms brilliance in this arrangement — work that is merely good but lands on the promised day, with the file names right and no reminders needed, is worth more than better work that arrives unpredictably.

It also solves a quieter problem, which is compounding. A month of clips is fine. Twelve months of clips from a single template is a library, a look and a recognisable feed.

How the work runs

Setup happens once. After that the week has the same shape every week, and that repetition is the whole economic engine — one kind of task run straight through the batch, rather than a different kind of task on every clip.

Setup, once. An intake folder structure with a dated subfolder per week, a visible queue board so you can see what sits at New, Editing, Review, Approved and Delivered, and the master template built — captions, hook style, colour, intro and outro frames, audio levels preset. It ends with two sample clips for you to approve the style on. Three to five days.
Ingest and selection. Everything pulled down, transcribed, scanned for the moments worth cutting, and the week's list locked. Nothing gets edited until the whole selection is agreed, because a clip cut before the list is settled is a clip that may have to be re-cut or dropped. About two hours.
Cuts only, across the whole batch. Every clip in the batch gets its in and out points and its internal trims — no captions, no music, no effects. One kind of thinking, held for the whole batch. About two and a half hours.
Captions and hook text, across the whole batch. Two or three words on screen at a time in a heavy sans, white with an outline so it survives any background, held inside the safe area — roughly the bottom fifteen percent, the top ten percent and the right ten percent belong to the platform's own interface, not to your text. About two and a half hours.
Music, levels, export, delivery. Audio normalised so nothing arrives loud and nothing arrives inaudible, music placed and ducked under speech, exports run and the batch delivered into the review stage. About two hours.
Revisions and next week's queue. One consolidated round, then the folder prepared for the following cycle. About ninety minutes.

Cut in CapCut for short form and DaVinci Resolve for long form, with the queue on a shared board so nobody has to ask where anything is, and ffmpeg for batch jobs like normalising twenty files to a consistent loudness in one pass.

What moves the price

Retainers here run $400–$4,000/mo and the arrangement is ongoing rather than fixed-term, so three things set the monthly level.

Volume and turnaround. How many pieces a month, and how fast each batch has to come back, are two separate levers and both move the number. Speed is priced explicitly because fast turnaround does not just use more hours, it reserves capacity that then cannot be sold to anyone else.

Whether selection is included. Cutting to your timestamps and finding the moments yourself are two different jobs. The second involves reading transcripts, judging what will hold, and being accountable for the choice.

How many formats each piece has to exist in. Every additional aspect ratio is real work — reframing so the subject stays in shot, repositioning captions inside a different safe area, and a separate export. It is never a checkbox.

What usually goes wrong

The clip count is never written down. You picture as many as we can manage; the arrangement, unwritten, means something narrower. By the third week you are either getting less than you expected or being billed for extras nobody had called extras, and the month has soured before it settled. The agreement states the count, the length range, the number of aspect ratios, the revisions included and the rate for extras — before the first file moves.

Each clip is finished end to end instead of the batch being finished stage by stage. It feels productive and it is the slower way to work. Switching between cutting, captioning and mixing on every single clip means re-entering a different kind of thinking each time, losing the shortcuts, and quietly redesigning the style partway through the batch. Batching by task is the difference between a manageable week and an unmanageable one.

No deadline is set for your own footage. The cycle is built on fixed days, so late footage does not compress — it displaces. Without an agreed cutoff date and a written consequence, every slipped week turns into an argument about whose delay it was, and the retainer starts feeling like a permanent emergency instead of a rhythm.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

How many clips do we get?: Whatever number is written in the agreement, and the number is written before anything starts. It specifies the count, the length range, how many aspect ratios, how many revisions per clip, and the rate for anything beyond it. Vague volume is the fastest way for a retainer to sour for both sides, so we make it boring and specific up front.
Do you choose the clips or do we?: Either, and they are priced differently because selection is a separate skill. If you send timestamps, we cut to them. If you send a two hour recording and want the moments found, that is editorial work — transcribing, reading, judging what will hold attention — and it appears as its own line rather than being absorbed silently.
What happens if our footage is late?: Delivery moves by the same amount, and that is agreed in advance rather than negotiated in the moment. The cycle only works because each stage is batched on a fixed day. Footage arriving two days late does not compress into the same week — it shifts the week. Saying this at the start prevents the argument that otherwise happens in month two.
Can every clip look different?: It can, but you should not want it to. The retainer works because one template — caption font, size, colour, position, hook style, intro and outro frames, audio levels — is built once and reused. That is what makes consistent output affordable and what makes your feed look like one brand. Restyling every clip is project work priced as project work.
How do you know the edits are any good?: By retention rather than views. The measure we ask for is average view duration divided by clip length, because that tells you whether people stayed. A drop at three seconds points at the hook. A drop around fifteen seconds points at a slack passage in the middle that should have been cut. Views tell you about reach, not about the edit.
What if we want to stop?: Give notice at the end of a billing month and the queue is cleared and delivered. You keep everything already produced. We are not interested in holding anyone in a retainer they have stopped getting value from — if the volume is wrong, the honest move is usually to resize it rather than cancel.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Video editing retainer All Video, Audio & Media Production services