Creative Team Capacity Planning for Video Teams: Counting the Rework
Video capacity plans break in week two because nobody counts revision rounds. This is how I measure real hours per deliverable, rework and waiting time included, before taking on another retainer.
My creative team capacity planning sheet told me, very very confidently, that my editors had room for eight more short-form cuts a week, right. So when a brand we had been cutting long-form for asked to add a second retainer, I said yes without even opening the sheet again.
Two weeks later we were on a review call with that same brand, and they asked, quite politely, why half of the new cuts were still stuck on their second and third rounds. Then they asked why the long-form edit they had been happy with for a whole year was suddenly a day late, and I didn't have a good answer for either question.
The sheet was correct about the first cuts and completely blind to everything after them, the notes, the re-exports, the cut that sat in their inbox for four days and came back on a Friday evening, and so on. That call is basically the reason I rebuilt the way we do creative team capacity planning, and this post is the version I use now, the one that counts the rework from the start.
Why video capacity plans fail in week two
Most capacity plans I've seen in video, including all of my own old ones, get built in week one, when everything is still a brief and a deadline and nobody has sent a single note yet, right. You multiply the deliverables by how long a first cut takes, you divide by the number of editors, and the sheet says there's room, so you say yes to the retainer.
The catch here is that a video deliverable is a first cut plus however many rounds the client needs, plus the exports and small fixes nobody logs, and all of that lands in week two, right on top of the new first cuts. Generic creative resource planning templates treat a deliverable as a fixed block of hours, which falls apart in post-production work, where the client watches the thing in motion and reacts to it.
In my agency the pattern used to repeat itself, week one looks calm, in week two the old rounds collide with the fresh first cuts, and by week three the long-form clients, who were never the problem, start getting late cuts. I wrote about the people side of this in meeting your team's video demands, so here I'll stay on the numbers, because I'm pretty sure most of the pain comes from what the sheet leaves out.
A capacity plan that only counts first cuts is planning for a team that never gets notes. Count the rounds and the admin, or the plan will be wrong by week two.
Measuring real hours per deliverable, rework included
The first thing I changed was the unit, right, so I stopped planning in "cuts" and started planning in real hours per deliverable. For us that means the first rough cut, plus every revision round, plus a fixed allowance per version for exporting, uploading and checking the file, because that admin is real time even if nobody calls it editing.
To get those hours I ask each editor to note start and stop times on a handful of deliverables per format for two weeks, because an editor estimating from memory gives you the optimistic number almost every time.
Here is a worked example with illustrative numbers, so swap in your own. Say a client wants ten vertical podcast clips a week, a first cut takes about 2 hours, each round of notes about 45 minutes, and every version about 15 minutes to export, upload and check. If the average clip ends on its third version, that's two rounds of notes, so each clip is 2 hours plus 1.5 hours of revisions plus 45 minutes of admin, about 4.25 hours a clip, right. The ten clips come to roughly 42 hours a week, against the 20 hours the old sheet would have shown me.
That is basically double, and the entire gap is rework and admin. I plan each editor at about 30 timeline hours out of a 40-hour week, because calls, briefs, file wrangling and so on eat the rest. So that podcast client, which looked like two thirds of an editor on the old sheet, is actually about 1.4 editors, and that's the number you need for honest editor workload planning before you promise anyone a turnaround.
Using version counts to price in revision rounds
The average rounds number has to come from somewhere real, because if you guess it you're back to the old sheet with extra steps, right. We pull it from version stacks in PlayPause, where every new export lands on the same card as the next version, MV1, MV2, MV3, MV4, so at the end of a month I can open a client's cards and see how far each deliverable went before approval.
One small thing trips people up, the version number is always one more than the rounds of notes, so a card that ended on MV3 had two rounds of feedback. Plug the version count straight into the sheet and you overcount every deliverable by one round. For instance, if one brand averages MV2 and another averages MV4, those two clients cost very different editor time for the same "ten clips a week" contract, so I now plan and price them differently.
Most teams skip this part of video editor capacity planning because their version history is a downloads folder full of final_v3_REAL files, which is about as far from proper version control as it gets. Version stacks are on Creator and up, and a month of them also shows you the clients who drift, like a series that creeps from two rounds to four, which I covered in handling four rounds per episode.
the sheet assumes one round per cut and the demanding clients quietly blow past it
version stacks show how far each card went, so rounds per client come from real history
Separating client waiting time from editor time
The second number that wrecks capacity plans is waiting, right, because a cut that has sat with the client for four days looks like a busy editor on most boards. We use custom statuses for this, something like In edit, Internal review, With client and Approved, so at any point I can count how many cuts sit in With client versus In edit.
Then who-watched analytics, which is on Creator and up, shows who opened the link, when and from which city. If a cut has been With client for three days and nobody has opened it, that's waiting time on their side, so it moves out of the editor's hours and into a schedule risk column. Editor time is time someone is actually cutting, waiting time is the gap between sending a link and the client pressing play, and they go in separate columns, does that make sense, right.
Waiting still costs you, though, because notes from a link opened late land right on top of next week's first cuts, so I keep a buffer of a few hours per editor for late notes, and we chase unopened links on day two instead of day five. I go deeper on this for teams spread across cities in the review layer for remote teams.
A cut nobody has opened is a waiting problem, and hiring another editor will never fix a waiting problem.
Building a creative team capacity planning template for a post team
I keep the sheet really simple, one row per client and format, because the moment it needs a training session nobody updates it, right. The columns are client, format, deliverables per week, first-cut hours, average rounds (version count minus one), hours per round, admin minutes per version, total weekly hours and the assigned editor. The total is first-cut hours plus rounds times hours per round plus versions times the admin allowance, all multiplied by deliverables per week, where versions is simply rounds plus one.
To show how it decides things, take the podcast row at about 42.5 hours and add a long-form client with one episode a week, say 12 first-cut hours, 1.5 rounds on average at 3 hours each and 30 minutes of admin per version, which comes to about 17.75 hours. Three editors at 30 real hours give you 90, those two rows use about 60, so the sheet shows roughly 30 spare hours. That sounds like room until you price eight more short-form cuts at the same 4.25 hours each and get 34 hours, right, so the honest answer is not yet, or only once those rounds come down, which is exactly the sum I skipped before that call.
Every Monday the manager on each client updates the In edit versus With client count and any new deliverables, once a month they refresh the average rounds from the last month of cards, and that's basically the whole maintenance job, because a single week of rounds is too noisy to plan on. In our workspace the Owner, Admin and Manager roles go to the people who plan and keep the statuses honest, and the Editor role goes to the people who cut.
Counting cards only takes a couple of minutes if every client is set up the same way, which is why I shared our folder structure template, and for a bigger team with several editors per client, start with PlayPause for post-production houses.
Cutting rework with client Playbooks
Once the sheet shows the rework honestly, the next move is to shrink it, right, because every round you remove is capacity you get back without hiring. In my agency a lot of second rounds came from rules that lived in one editor's head, the caption style, where the logo sits, which words the brand never says and so on, and the moment a different editor picked up that client, the round came right back.
Playbooks in PlayPause are on Agency and up, and they're basically a per-client document of creative style and direction, a living version of the creative brief that sits next to the work. Brand playbooks hold the permanent rules and folder playbooks hold the specifics of one campaign or series. The checklists inside are not done until someone ticks them, so nobody quietly skips the caption check on a Friday evening, and you can share a Playbook as a page with no login, so the client can read the rules and flag anything wrong before a cut goes out instead of in round two.
For capacity this matters a lot, because a new editor, or a freelancer you bring in for a busy month, starts with the client's rules instead of learning them through notes, which is the whole idea behind cutting revision rounds permanently.
- Caption font, size and placement
- Logo and end card rules
- Music and sound effect limits
- Words and claims the brand avoids
- Approval contact and response window
When the numbers say hire, and when they say fix the process
At the end of the day the sheet is only useful if it changes a decision, and that decision is usually hire another editor or fix how a client works with you, right. My rough rule is that if first-cut hours alone are already over your editors' real hours, you need another person, because no process will make a first cut faster than it actually is.
If the first cuts fit but one or two clients average MV4 while everyone else sits at MV2, that's a process problem, usually a vague brief or plain scope creep. The fix there is a Playbook plus real deadlines on notes, which I covered in how real deadlines stop revisions, and if the With client column is full of links nobody has opened, the fix is on the approval side, so look at our creative approval workflow template before you spend money on a hire.
Trust me on any level, hiring into a process that leaks rework just means you pay two people to do the same round twice.
When the numbers do say hire, tool cost shouldn't be part of the argument, and this is where flat pricing helps. PlayPause is priced per workspace, so Agency covers up to 50 members for $19 a month whether you have six editors or sixteen, and adding a person stays a salary decision. Per-user tools work the other way, Frame.io for instance starts at $15 per user per month, so every hire grows the review bill too, and I walk through that math on flat pricing for post studios.
Frequently asked questions
How many revision rounds should I plan for per deliverable?
I don't use an industry average, because every client behaves differently and a generic number just hides the expensive ones, right. Pull each client's own history from their version stacks, subtract one from the version count to get rounds, and plan with that. For a brand new client with no history, I plan two rounds and correct it after the first month of real cards.
Can I use a generic creative team capacity planning template?
You can start with one, to be very honest, but most generic templates count a deliverable as a fixed block of hours, which is exactly the assumption that breaks for video. Whatever template you pick, add columns for average rounds per client, hours per round and admin time per version, and keep waiting time out of the editor totals so the sheet reflects real cutting hours.
Does PlayPause cost more when I add editors?
Only once you outgrow your plan's member limit, because the pricing is flat per workspace rather than per person. For most post teams the plan that matters is Agency with 50 members, and past that Enterprise covers 150, so the call on a new editor comes down to salary. And if you ever move down a plan later, downgrading never deletes your content.
If you want to see your own rounds, statuses and unopened links in one place before you take on the next retainer, have a look at PlayPause pricing. Every plan comes with a 7-day free trial, and a month of version stacks will tell you more about your real capacity than any sheet I could hand you.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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