A realistic stack for a three-editor studio costs about $285 a month on annual billing and $322 monthly, covering an assistant for scripts, Adobe Premiere for editing, Descript for captions and audio, ElevenLabs for voices, Opus Clip for shorts and Runway for generated shots. DaVinci Resolve is the cheaper editing route.
Roundups rank tools by features. A studio owner needs the other view: what each tool costs for three people, what it must save to pay for itself, and what it may not be allowed to touch. The editing licence decides most of the total: three Premiere seats are about $114 a month, while three DaVinci Resolve Studio licences cost $708 once and pay back in about six months.
A priced stack for three editors
Prices are USD list prices as of October and November 2026. Adobe's plans page, read in dollars, lists Premiere at $22.99 a month for individuals and $37.99 a month per licence for teams, both on an annual plan billed monthly, with no month-to-month price shown; Adobe serves local prices by region, so confirm at checkout. Where a vendor showed only one billing option, the same number appears in both columns: Premiere, Opus Clip (its page lists monthly prices only) and Canva Pro, whose $144-a-year price is used for both because Canva's pricing page would not load for me.
| Job | Tool | Seats | Annual, per month | Monthly, per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Script and briefs | ChatGPT Business Standard (or Claude Team Standard) | 3 | $60.00 | $75.00 |
| Editing | Adobe Premiere, teams licence | 3 | $113.97 | $113.97 |
| Captions and audio | Descript Creator | 1 | $24.00 | $35.00 |
| Shorts | Opus Clip Pro | 1 | $29.00 | $29.00 |
| Voice | ElevenLabs Creator | 1 | $18.33 | $22.00 |
| Generated shots | Runway Pro | 1 | $28.00 | $35.00 |
| Graphics | Canva Pro | 1 | $12.00 | $12.00 |
| Total | $285.30 | $321.97 |
That is $95 to $107 per editor per month. Add an avatar tool such as HeyGen Creator ($24 annual, $29 monthly) and the totals become $309.30 and $350.97. A leaner version, with free DaVinci Resolve, the assistant, Descript Hobbyist, Opus Clip Starter and Canva, comes to $103 on annual billing and $126 monthly.
Seats follow the work. All three editors need the assistant and the editing licence. The captions, voice, shorts, generation and graphics seats sit with one person each, with a rota for who uses them, because a generation tool used by one person for four hours a month does not need three seats.
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Buy nowScript and brief: where the assistant earns its seat
A general assistant is the cheapest tool in the studio per hour saved, and the one with the widest use: treatments, client emails, shot lists, caption copy and edit notes. ChatGPT Business Standard and Claude Team Standard both list at $20 a seat annually and $25 monthly, with a two-seat minimum, so three editors pay $60 to $75. Neither trains on business content by default, which matters when the material is a client's unreleased script.
The use I would add that roundups skip is the paper edit. Give the assistant a transcript and ask for a selects list before anyone opens the timeline.
Below is the transcript of a 38-minute interview with the owner of a
craft brewery supplier, with timecodes. Build a paper edit for a 3-minute
film about "why we switched to local hops".
Return: ordered selects as timecode ranges, a one-line reason for each,
and any gap where we need b-roll. Use only what is said in the transcript.An illustrative output: "00:04:12 to 00:04:48, the owner explains the cost problem with imported hops; 00:11:05 to 00:11:31, the first local harvest; gap: no b-roll of the hop fields." What you fix: assistants sometimes merge two lines from different parts of an answer into one select, so the editor plays every range before building. The time saved is the first read-through of 38 minutes, roughly 45 minutes of an editor's morning. Bigger prompt sets sit in how videographers use AI to edit, caption and quote faster.
Editing: Premiere or DaVinci Resolve
This is the biggest line in the stack and the one with a real alternative.
Adobe Premiere was Premiere Pro until its rename in January 2026. Adobe's product page lists Text-Based Editing, AI-powered Media Intelligence search, noise reduction and dialogue enhancement, AI music fitting, and Firefly-powered Generative Extend, Object Mask and Generate on the timeline. The AI features use generative credits, and the Premiere-only plan's allowance is small: Adobe's Premiere page lists 25 generative credits a month with the Premiere plan, against 4,000 with Creative Cloud Pro. If you plan to extend or generate clips regularly, that gap decides the plan, not the sticker price.
DaVinci Resolve has a free version and a Studio licence at $236 as a one-off (shown on the page as down from $295). Blackmagic describes a Neural Engine in Studio with features including smart reframing, speed warp retiming, super scale, auto colour and colour matching, and names voice isolation among its Fairlight AI effects. The page does not say whether voice isolation is free or Studio-only.
The sum: three Studio licences cost $708 once. Premiere for teams costs about $114 a month for three. The licences pay back in about six months and then stop costing anything, while Premiere's costs continue. What Premiere offers in return is its cloud ecosystem, and clients whose files arrive as Premiere projects. Choose by what your clients send you and what your editors know, since retraining three people costs more than either price.
A quick way to decide between the two is to look at who sends you work.
- Clients who send Premiere projects or expect to receive them: stay on Premiere. Reopening and converting projects costs more in hours than the licence saves.
- Mostly your own shoots, delivered as finished files: Resolve Studio is the cheaper long-run choice, particularly if one editor already colours in it.
- A mixed bag: keep one Premiere seat for client-project work and run Resolve on the other two. Two tools cost training time, so only do this if the editors are willing.
Captions and audio: Descript against the editor's own tools
Descript edits video by editing its transcript, which suits interviews and webinars. Its pricing page lists a Free plan (1 media hour, 720p export with a watermark), Hobbyist at $16 annually or $24 monthly, Creator at $24 or $35, and Business at $50 or $65, per person. Media hours rise from 10 on Hobbyist to 30 on Creator and 40 on Business, and monthly AI credits from 400 to 800 and 1,500. Hobbyist adds tools such as Studio Sound and filler-word removal; Creator adds more AI tools and video generation; Business adds a team Brand Studio, translation with proofreading and custom avatars.
A studio finishing 72 minutes of client video a month fits comfortably inside Creator's 30 media hours. The decision is whether it beats the editor's built-in captioning on plan and effort. An illustrative test: caption one 10-minute interview in both and time the correction pass. If one tool needs 25 minutes of fixing and the other 10, the extra $24 a month pays back inside the month.
Caption accuracy matters more than the tool; the checks for names, numbers and line breaks are set out in subtitle accuracy checks for client videos.
Voice: ElevenLabs plans and consent limits
ElevenLabs lists monthly prices of $6 (Starter) and $22 (Creator), then $99, $299 and $990 on its Pro, Scale and Business plans, with annual billing giving two months free, which makes Creator $18.33 a month. For a studio, Creator is the point to start, because Professional Voice Cloning starts at Creator and adds a voice-captcha step meant to prove the clone is of the person making it.
Use it for three jobs: scratch voice-overs so clients approve timing before a real recording, small corrections to a recorded line, and narration for videos where the client has chosen a synthetic voice. Do not clone a voice for anyone without their written consent. If your client's presenter is the voice, consent should name the film, the length of time and the platforms. The consent questions are in AI voice-over for videos.
Shorts and generated shots: Opus Clip and Runway
Opus Clip prices by processed minutes: 60 a month free (watermarked, with projects kept for three days), 150 for $15 on Starter and 300 for $29 on Pro. A studio cutting five 45-minute webinars a month needs 225 minutes, which is Pro territory.
Runway prices by credits: Free gives 125 one-off credits, Standard is $15 monthly or $12 annually for 625 credits, Pro is $35 or $28 for 2,250, and Max is $95 or $76 for 9,500. At about 12 credits a second, Pro is roughly three minutes of generated video a month, so the plan fits a studio that needs a handful of animated stills and b-roll fills, and not one that wants to generate whole films. Credit top-ups are listed on Pro only, which is another reason to start there. Because the plan is monthly, it is the easiest line to switch off between projects.
What each tool must save before it pays
Divide each monthly price by your internal hourly cost to get the hours it must save. Using $45 an hour for an illustrative studio:
| Tool | Monthly cost (annual billing) | Hours to break even | Where the saving comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant, 3 seats | $60.00 | 1.3 | Paper edits, treatments, client emails |
| Premiere, 3 seats | $113.97 | 2.5 | Core tool, not optional |
| Descript Creator | $24.00 | 0.5 | Transcript editing, caption correction |
| Opus Clip Pro | $29.00 | 0.6 | First cut of vertical clips |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $18.33 | 0.4 | Scratch tracks, small fixes |
| Runway Pro | $28.00 | 0.6 | Fills and animated stills |
| Canva Pro | $12.00 | 0.3 | Thumbnails, lower-third drafts |
| Whole stack | $285.30 | 6.3 | About 2.1 hours per editor a month |
On the monthly-billing prices the whole stack needs about 7.2 hours, 2.4 per editor. That is a low bar for any editor who captions or cuts shorts regularly, and a high one for a studio that mostly shoots and finishes single hero films. Be honest about your mix. If shorts, captions and voice work are a small share of your month, the lean stack is the better fit.
A month of work against the bar
Say a studio finishes 12 projects: six corporate films, four social packs and two explainers. Captions across 72 finished minutes took about 12 hours by hand last year, and take about 3.6 with a tool and a check: a saving of 8.4 hours. Two webinar-to-shorts packs took 12 hours each by hand and about 3.75 with Opus Clip and finishing: a saving of 16.5 hours. Those two jobs alone are about 25 hours, against a break-even of roughly 1.2 hours for the two tools. The assistant, voice and generation lines are harder to measure, which is why I would log hours on them for a month before renewing. The figures are illustrative; use your own log.
Client data and licensing limits by tool
| Tool | What to check before client footage goes in | What I could confirm |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Business or Claude Team | Training and retention on business content | No training on business content by default |
| Adobe Premiere, Firefly features | Which model generated an element | Adobe's commercial-safety claim covers its own Firefly models, not partner models in the Firefly app; IP indemnity is for eligible enterprise customers |
| DaVinci Resolve | Whether any feature sends media to a cloud service | Desktop software; check each cloud feature separately |
| Descript | Retention, training, team access | SOC 2 Type II is listed under Enterprise; check terms for other plans |
| Opus Clip | Uploads of sensitive material | Help centre silent on training; privacy policy asks that special-category data stay out of uploads |
| ElevenLabs | Consent for any cloned voice | Professional cloning needs Creator or above and a voice-captcha check |
| Runway | Terms on commercial use, training and output rights | Terms (updated 23 October 2026) leave commercial use of outputs unrestricted but let Runway train its models on inputs and outputs, and warn that outputs may not be unique |
Two rules cover most of it. Material under a confidentiality agreement stays in tools you have read the terms of, and in desktop editing where nothing is uploaded. And ownership of AI-made elements is uncertain: OpenAI's and Anthropic's terms assign you their rights in outputs "if any", so contracts should assign whatever rights exist and promise no more. Disclosure and consent for the services these tools allow you to sell are covered in the companion tutorial on AI video services and pricing.
A tool register for one client project, filled in
A one-line-per-tool register makes the data and consent questions answerable in a minute, and it is the document a careful client will ask for. Here is one for a webinar-to-shorts job for a specialist food importer, as an illustration.
| Tool | Used for | Footage uploaded? | Client told? | Consent or check needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant | Paper edit from transcript | Transcript only | Yes, in the proposal | Remove names of any guests not covered |
| Premiere or Resolve | Edit and finishing | Local files | Yes | None beyond the contract |
| Descript | Transcript and captions | Webinar audio | Yes | Speaker names checked on screen |
| Opus Clip | First cut of vertical clips | Webinar video | Yes | No special-category material in the footage |
| Canva | Thumbnails | Brand assets | Yes | Logo use confirmed |
Keep the register in the project folder and send it with the final delivery. If a client later asks which tools saw their footage, the answer is already written. It also shows you quickly when a job needs a tool you have not vetted, since a blank "client told" cell stops the upload.
A mistake: the stack nobody opened
An illustrative version. A four-person studio buys every tool a roundup mentions: two editors' subscriptions, a captions tool, a shorts tool, a voice tool, two generation tools and an avatar tool. Nine subscriptions, about $400 a month. Three months later, a seat audit shows one generation tool opened twice and the avatar tool never.
The fix is a standing rule rather than a one-off clean-up. Buy a new tool on a monthly plan only after a named person has a named job for it. At the 60-day mark, look at usage. Cancel anything under two uses a week, and move survivors to annual billing only if they clear their break-even comfortably. The same audit habit appears in best AI filmmaking tools by job, which groups a broader set of tools by production stage.
A leaner stack and a fuller one
| Stack | What is in it | Annual, per month | Monthly, per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lean | Resolve free, assistant (3 seats), Descript Hobbyist, Opus Clip Starter, Canva Pro | $103.00 | $126.00 |
| Base | The seven lines in the first table | $285.30 | $321.97 |
| Full | Base plus HeyGen Creator | $309.30 | $350.97 |
| Resolve Studio variant of Base | Base without Premiere; $708 one-off for three licences | $171.33 plus $708 once | $208.00 plus $708 once |
The Lean row is a fair starting point for a studio with two or three editors and a social-heavy client list. The Full row only makes sense once a client has asked for presenter videos and you have written the likeness-consent wording.
A 30-day trial before you commit
- Week one: start the assistant and the editor, and nothing else. Log hours saved on paper edits and client emails.
- Week two: add Descript or the built-in captions and time the correction pass on one real project.
- Week three: add Opus Clip on one webinar and compare it to a manual cut of the same source.
- Week four: add voice and generation only if a booked project needs them. Check the client's consent and data terms before any footage goes in.
At day 30, keep what cleared its break-even hours, and cancel the rest.
Questions studio owners ask when choosing video software
Is DaVinci Resolve cheaper than Premiere for three editors?
Usually, after about six months. Resolve Studio listed at $236 as a one-off per licence, so three licences cost $708 once. Premiere for teams at $37.99 per licence is about $114 a month for three. The free Resolve version costs nothing but lacks the Studio features.
Do I need a separate captioning tool?
Not always. Check what your editor already does for transcripts and captions on your plan. Add a tool such as Descript when the time saved checking and fixing transcripts beats its $24 to $35 a month, which at a $45 internal hourly cost is under an hour a month.
Can client footage go into any cloud tool?
Only if the contract and the tool's terms allow it. Unreleased or confidential footage should stay in tools you have checked for training and retention terms, or in desktop editing that sends nothing to a cloud service. Ask the client when in doubt.
Is a generative video plan worth paying for monthly?
Only in months you use it. Credit-based plans such as Runway's can be started and stopped monthly, so pay for Pro in the months with generated shots in the schedule and drop to Standard or Free between them.
Which AI tools are no longer available?
Sora is discontinued, with its app closed on 26 April 2026 and its API on 24 September 2026. Adobe Premiere Pro was renamed Adobe Premiere in January 2026. Check any older roundup for tools that have closed or changed plans.
Further reads
- AI Video Script Generator for Production Companies: Brief to Draft — Draft scripts from a client brief.
- AI Storyboard Generator From a Script: A Video Producer's Workflow — Turn a script into storyboard frames.
- AI Shot List Generator: Build a Shoot-Day Plan From the Script — Build the shoot-day plan from the script.
- AI Video Translator for Corporate Video: Dubbing, Subtitles, Checks — Add translated versions with checks.
- Video Production Pricing Sheet: Build a Rate Card With AI — Price the work the stack makes possible.
- Best AI for Filmmakers Selling Video Services to Local Businesses — Sell the output to local business clients.
- Best AI UGC Video Editors for Marketing Agencies: Costs and a One-Brief Trial Plan — See AI video editors tested on one brief.
- Videographer Software: Client Review, Approvals and Invoices Compared — Frame-comment review tools, proposal and invoice tools and free tiers compared for a working videographer, with dated prices and AI for feedback.
- How Can AI Help Videographers Consolidate Client Revision Feedback? — Turn emails and review-tool comments from three stakeholders into one timecoded list, flag conflicts, check the contract rounds and get sign-off.
- AI Rough Cut From a Transcript: First Edits for Small Video Teams — Three ways to get a rough cut from a transcript, a time log that measures the editing left afterwards, and where AI cuts go wrong.
- AI Tools for TV Production: Transcripts, Logging and Clearance Notes — Choose a transcript and logging tool, build a searchable clip log, and keep human sign-off on rights.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: vendor pages for Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Descript, ElevenLabs, Opus Clip, Runway and Canva, plus recent USD price checks, October to November 2026.