This is the most reasonable objection we hear, and it is usually true. Most universities with a serious online operation have someone — often someone very good — who edits lecture video. The flagship MBA looks fine. The Vice-Chancellor's address looks excellent.
The question is not whether they can do the work. It is how many hours there are.
The arithmetic
A twenty-course programme carries about 400 finished hours of video. Editing to the standard we are describing — segmentation, captions, branding, cards, occasional cutaways — runs somewhere between six and ten hours of work per finished hour. Take the optimistic end.
One programme, one term
Six hundred productive hours assumes roughly twenty working weeks and about thirty genuinely productive editing hours a week — the rest going to meetings, briefs, revisions, exports, file wrangling and the things that actually fill a week. Use ten hours per finished hour instead and the requirement is nearly seven editors.
And they are not doing nothing else
The AV team also covers convocation, the annual report film, the Vice-Chancellor's address, admissions videos, three live-streamed guest lectures, the NAAC visit documentation, and whatever the marketing department needs by Thursday. Lecture editing is the work that gets postponed, because it is the only item on that list without a fixed external date — until the term starts.
The constraint is never skill. It is that the flagship course gets the attention and the other nineteen get whatever is left, which is usually a straight export.
Hiring your way out
Payscale puts the average Indian film and video editor at ₹4,38,509 a year across 364 reported profiles. Four of them is roughly ₹17.5 lakh in salary, before equipment, software, workspace, recruitment time and the management overhead of a four-person team — and before accounting for the fact that lecture editing at volume is repetitive work with poor retention.
Producing the same 400 hours through the pipeline is ₹8 lakh at Essentials or ₹20 lakh fully produced — a one-time cost against a recurring salary line, with no hiring and no calendar risk.
The version of this we actually recommend
Not replacing the team. We have never once seen that be the right answer, and proposing it is how a vendor loses the only internal ally they had.
Your team keeps the work that needs judgement. Convocation, the flagship course, anything with a live element, anything where the institution's voice matters.
The pipeline takes the volume. The nineteen courses nobody is reaching, at a consistent standard, on a schedule that does not depend on anyone's week.
Your team reviews rather than edits. Approving 400 hours is a fraction of the time of cutting it, and it keeps editorial control exactly where it should be.
Put to an AV director in those terms, this usually stops being an objection. Nobody who has been asked to deliver four hundred hours with two people is defending the status quo. They are defending the assumption that you understood the problem.
Sources
Payscale, Film / Video Editor salary in India, 364 profiles, updated July 2026. Data
Editing-hour ratios are our own working assumptions, stated so you can substitute your own.