Estimating cost for a large or long-form project

If you're weighing Eddie against a budget — a documentary, a long interview series, months of footage — "it depends" is a true answer but not a useful one on its own. This walks through what actually drives cost, with real numbers, so you can build your own estimate instead of guessing.

The two things that cost credits

Importing footage costs 250 credits per hour of source, billed in 15-minute blocks (15-minute minimum — the smallest import is 63 credits). This is the one you can size up front, because it scales directly with how much footage you have.

Editing is mostly free. Cuts, trims, captions, titles, color, motion — most of what you'd prompt Eddie to do costs nothing beyond the import. Placing b-roll on a cut is the exception, and it is priced below.

A specific set of AI actions do cost credits, each priced by the actual unit of work — minutes of audio or video generated, characters of script, hours of footage analyzed, or clips produced — not a flat fee per action. Eleven examples, at current rates:

Action	What it costs	Example
Generate AI music	200 credits/minute generated	an 80-second track ≈ 267 credits
Generate an AI voice-over	~178 credits per 1,000 characters (~150 words)	a 300-word script (~2,000 characters, the max per call) ≈ 356 credits
Generate AI b-roll (video)	156 credits per 8-second clip (standard tier)	a 3-clip sequence ≈ 468 credits
Cut b-roll subclips from your own footage	600 credits/hour analyzed, 10 credits/clip minimum	an hour cut into 12 clips ≈ 600 credits
Place b-roll on a cut	350 credits/hour of the b-roll files your cut uses, each file counted once	a cut drawing on 14 files totalling 42 minutes ≈ 245 credits
Stabilize shaky footage	40 credits/minute of source, per clip stabilized	a 90-second handheld shot ≈ 60 credits
Re-transcribe a source	250 credits/hour, 15-minute minimum	a 10-minute re-transcribe ≈ 63 credits
Detect a music track's beat grid	2 credits/minute of audio	a 3-minute track ≈ 6 credits
Get Eddie's editorial feedback on a cut	~4.3 credits/minute + ~6.5 fixed	a 10-minute cut ≈ 50 credits
Resync all multicam angles automatically	~2–3 credits/minute of ungrouped footage + ~6 fixed	an hour of ungrouped footage ≈ 150 credits
Export a tiered selects timeline	~15 credits/hour of footage in scope	10 hours in scope ≈ 150 credits

A large first-assembly build across a lot of footage still costs more than a small tweak even when no single action above is involved — that part is priced on the work the run actually does, not listed here as a rate. This side is harder to size in advance than import, because it depends on what you ask for, not just how much footage you have.

Worth being specific about b-roll, since "add b-roll" sounds like one thing and is really several. Finding it (search) and planning a sequence are free. Reading what's already in your footage (analysis) is free too — it runs automatically at import, which already paid for it. Placing b-roll on a cut costs 350 credits per hour of the b-roll files your cut uses. Each file counts once, at its own full length, however many clips you take from it, and you pay once per edit — a later revision that reuses files you already paid for costs nothing. Eddie quotes the price before it places anything. Creating footage that doesn't exist yet is paid as well: generating new AI b-roll, or cutting fresh subclips out of raw footage with AI guidance (both listed above).

Full detail on both, including exports: How credits and billing work.

Worked example: importing your footage

Here's the import cost at a few sizes, at the published rate of 250 credits/hour:

Footage	Import credits	Roughly, at list pricing
1 hour	250	free (inside your first 500)
10 hours	2,500	~$23
50 hours	12,500	~$100
100 hours	25,000	~$175
800–1,000 hours	200,000–250,000	talk to sales

That's import only — before a single prompt, edit or export. The "roughly" figures use the per-credit rate of whichever pack fits closest ($10/1,000, $45/5,000, $120/15,000, or $350/50,000 — see Pricing); credits never expire, so buying a bigger pack than one project needs isn't wasted — the rest carries over.

What imports don't tell you about the rest

Import is the predictable half. The other half — the AI editing work itself — is priced on what each run actually does, and for a project this size that's genuinely hard to predict from footage volume alone. A first assembly across months of raw footage costs more than fixing a caption; how much more depends on the edit, not a formula. The most honest way to find out is to run the numbers on your own footage rather than trust an estimate built on averages that may not look like your project.

Exports

Sending a finished timeline to your NLE costs 100 credits per export, flat, whatever format — Premiere, Resolve, FCPXML, OTIO, EDL. A multi-episode series exported once per episode still adds up to a few hundred credits at most — a rounding error next to the import cost above. Re-exporting after notes costs the same 100 each time.

Try it on real footage before you scale up

New accounts start with 500 free credits — enough to import about 2 hours and take a real cut through to export. For a project this size, that's the useful move: run one episode, chapter, or day of footage all the way through — import, prompt, export — and read your own actual burn in the sidebar. That's a real number from your own footage and your own editing style, not an average from someone else's project.

Team projects

If a team is cutting this together, credits are drawn from one shared workspace pool, not billed per person. See What everyone in a workspace can see (and spend) before you add editors to a workspace with client footage in it.

Related: How credits and billing work, Import your footage, Contact support.