Client handed me 50 raw videos of their restaurant and wants reels + marketing material in 2 days.

Moderator Announcement Read More » Friendly Reminder r/smallbusiness is a question and answer subreddit. Ask a question about starting, owning, and growing a small business and the community answers. Posts that violate the rules listed in the sidebar will be removed. Please do not conduct market research on our community. We are not your focus group and asking us about our pain points, needs, what is hardest about X, etc. is not asking about how small business works or for real help with running your small business. These posts are subject to removal and given the community's disgust with the constant spamming of these posts you might just destroy your brand and contaminate your company search results. Seeing this message does not mean your post was automatically removed. If you asked about pain points or are directly or indirectly promoting a product please remove your post. Come back to post an honest question or give a knowledgeable response to someone else's question and leave your company name in your own profile. We can tell if you know what you're doing and the community can reach out if they need to. We welcome honest question posts, especially from newcomers. Thank you for your post. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Correct. Then you mark that up and sell it. You are the producer or manager in this scenario. I have a guy in India on Fiverr who makes me 30 second promo videos out of a bunch of crap footage/stills for $60 a pop. I usually tip him a little over that. Saves me hours of labor.

Start by letting the owner know what a reasonable turn around is. Get aligned on that first. Then deliver within that.

They won’t post all Content at once anyway. Maybe set up a delivery schedule. A few videos every few days or something like that

You are the editor there for you dictate how long it takes you. You wouldn't walk into their kitchen and demand a beef brisket in 20 minutes. Your best method for scrubbing videos is your own eyes as ai is a hit and miss for finding worthy clips as it will either give you garbage or it will miss gold.

Welcome to editing, time to get to work. In the time you’re looking for AI shortcuts that don’t work you could have pulled a selects sequence to start working from

You are not an employee, you let them know how long it will take, not the other way around. Create SLAs, milestones, and timelines and never let the client set deadlines like this in the near future by having contracts in place. You'll need to buckle up and get it done if you agreed to this. There is no tool that can do the work of a human finding the good moments.

I would farm this out to Fiverr

The thing killing you is the scrubbing, not the cutting, so attack that first. For anything with talking (the owner interviews, customers), run them through a transcript-based editor like Descript. You read the transcript instead of watching, delete the boring lines, and the video cuts itself. That alone clears half your folder in an hour. For the silent b-roll (kitchen, lunch rush) there's honestly no AI that reliably knows what's "good" for a restaurant yet. Fastest manual trick is to drop all 50 into one timeline and scrub at 3-4x with thumbnails on, dropping in/out markers as you go. The auto-highlight tools (Opus, Captions) are built for long podcasts and tend to whiff on short b-roll. And genuinely, reset the client's expectations. 50 raw clips into reels plus a menu promo plus ad cutdowns in two days is a real amount of work. I'd deliver two strong hero reels on day two and the rest a couple days later, instead of eight rushed mediocre ones. Better for them and for you.

I would back out of that deal.

Reelify is what you want if you have an M powered Mac. Locally chop all the files no credit counting

Is there a contract in place?

Try Opus 👌🏾

The app capcut does it! But I agree that you need to have a conversation and inform them what a realistic timeline is and present the options to them

I just used a combination of multiple AIs to take 96 hrs of footage and make 3 months of Videos and Images for social media marketing. Took me a few hours. If you can’t figure out how to get faster than you’re not using AI correctly and that’s 100% you being not clever enough and kids and smart older folks are going to take the jobs you are making excuses for

That doesn’t sound like a reasonable request. This is an opportunity to practice setting boundaries and managing expectations with your clients. My approach would be to push back, let them know how long the work will take to complete, and find out which ones are the most urgent. From there, I would complete the most urgent ones first, and deliver those in a couple days and complete the rest over a reasonable timeline. If that isn’t acceptable to them, I would probably reconsider the relationship. In my consulting practice, I have fired clients that behaved that way. It’s a respect thing, and I won’t tolerate disrespect. You shouldn’t, either.

Ai? Just watch the damn clips and check what and how you want to use it.

Have you tried using and AI to sort and choose best clips ?