Editor Hour Ledger

The Editor Hour Ledger treats every editing tool as a claim on a fixed pool of senior editor time, not as a productivity multiplier. The category description is explicit: the relevant result is the measured change in accepted deliverables and labor, not a category-wide multiplier. So the framework asks one question per tool: how many editor hours does it remove from a representative brief, and how many does it add back as review, correction, or re-export? A tool that cuts a 90-minute assembly to 20 minutes but adds 40 minutes of caption cleanup and color matching has a net gain of 30 minutes, not 70. Run the same brief through two or three services, log hours at each stage, and compare accepted output. Agencies that keep this ledger per retainer can price managed video work against real labor instead of vendor promises.