8 Tools to Plan Your YouTube Video Length Before Recording

The method is a word count and a speaking rate, and it happens before anyone touches a camera. I write the script out in full, count the words, and divide by 140 to 160 words a minute, which is about where conversational delivery lands.

At 150, a 1,200 word script is an eight minute video. If the brief says six minutes, I cut 300 words on the page rather than find the problem in the edit.

I am not sanguine about judging runtime by feel. Guessing almost always runs long, and the extra time shows up as throat-clearing before the first real point.

The part that makes it hold is budgeting words by section. The hook gets 30 seconds and each main point gets 90, and each one carries its own word allowance, so a section over its words is visibly over its minutes.

We work in video and audio, so this comes up constantly. The sanguine approach, where you record first and fix it later, costs more editing time than the planning would have taken. I am much more sanguine about a script that already knows how long it is.

My method is low tech. I write the script first, then read it aloud against a stopwatch, because the only honest measure of a video's length is how long it takes a person to say the words out loud.

A word count gets you close on the first pass. Spoken delivery for most people runs somewhere around 130 to 150 words a minute, so a 400 word script lands near three minutes. I am not sanguine about stopping there. Reading it aloud is what catches the sentences that look short on the page and take ten seconds to get through.

The videos I make are short use case pieces built around one situation a viewer recognizes, like a student away at school who finds it hard to keep up with family. One point like that does not need four minutes, and reading the script tells me so before I have set up a camera.

What makes me least sanguine is picking a target length first and then writing to fill it. Let the point decide the runtime and you will be more sanguine about the final cut.

The method I use is a word count tied to a speaking pace. Spoken delivery on camera runs around 140 to 150 words per minute for most people. So a 6 minute video needs a script near 850 to 900 words. I write the script first, paste it into a word counter, and divide by my pace. That gives me the runtime before I ever hit record.

The pace number only works if it's yours. I read a couple of paragraphs aloud once, time it, and use that figure from then on. Everyone's different, and a fast talker who uses the generic number ends up 20 percent short.

I also mark the script in sections with a target time for each one. Hook gets 20 to 30 seconds, the main points get most of the runtime, and the call to action gets a few lines. If one section runs long on paper, I cut it right there in the doc instead of finding out in the edit.

Then I do one timed read-through. Pauses, b-roll beats, and screen shares add time that a word count misses, so I pad about 10 percent for them. After that the finished video lands within a few seconds of the plan.

For anything I produce for marketing, the script is the whole plan. The camera part is easy once the length is already decided.

My whole method is a timer and my own voice. Before I record, I write the video out as bullets, one line per idea, then I talk through each bullet out loud with the clock running and write the elapsed time in the margin next to it. Five bullets later I have a real runtime, not a guess.

I do it that way because reading an outline in my head always lies to me. Silent reading is fast, talking is slow, and the gap between the two is where a planned 8 minute video turns into 14. Saying it out loud at recording pace is the only estimate I trust, and it takes about as long as the video itself.

When the total runs past what I want, I delete a whole bullet rather than trim words inside every bullet. Shaving sentences makes the delivery rushed and the video still runs long. Dropping one idea entirely gets me the runtime back in one move and the remaining points get more room to breathe.

I plan the agendas for my masterminds the same way. I talk each block through against a clock before anyone shows up, because the sessions that run over are always the ones I only timed in my head.

When I am working on a YouTube video that needs a specific timing, I want to follow a pacing structure similar to the three-act format in Hollywood movies. In the first act, I want to establish the problem. The second act provides the higher view and the third act gives examples and a wrap-up.

Budgeting for time like this helps create the containers that need to be filled to make the content. If I have five minutes total, then 1 minute gets spent on the problem, 1-2 on the instruction, and 2-3 on the examples. With that structure, I can break away from scripting and just focus on refining my messaging for each "container."

The exception to this is if I am explaining a concept that takes longer to work through or needs detailed examples. In that case, the length of the video is secondary to providing a solid explanation and I will ignore any length constraints. I know plenty of people that have felt like a topic was not explained with a video that was structured to be shorter, so I let the function take the lead here.

Screen tutorials and their word-count calculators often mislead when it comes to their length. The 150-words-per-minute rule obviously doesn't account for all clicks, loading screens and terminal commands in MT4 & VPS setup videos.

My method for making these screen tutorials is to first perform a full walk-through of connecting to a live server (that I am using for the video) and recording every step in a spreadsheet. Then I can write a script that follows those exact blocks of recording. If a block of recording is too long then the script can be cut, but not the video padded out with irrelevant rubbish.

Measuring system latency to set up work around it is much the same as following a process to build a tutorial video. The first time we forgot to do this a 3-minute 'setup' tutorial ended up being 7:40 in length due to the installer having stalled on a 'fresh' Windows install. These days the spreadsheet total ends up being the video length plus a maximum of 10 seconds.

I try to plan video length based on the average viewer's attention span. To test this against the script for CheapForexVPS videos before recording them, I have a colleague with a coffee mark a point where they start to glance at their screen to see how long they have been listening, or they start to nod politely instead of saying "yes" - and this point usually ends up being the point to cut the rest of the video and move it to the front of the video instead.

It works like a viewing. People who come to view a property decide within the first few rooms whether they are interested or not. Agents who insist on showing every cupboard lose their buyers within a couple of rooms. In the same way, viewers arrive at your content with a question and will leave when you cease to answer it. I check this against the retention graphs for similar content on past uploads to see where the drop-off tends to occur. If the listener test and the data for similar content correlate roughly, then that is the length I work to, and if necessary, I cut the script to fit, rather than extend to fill.