Four projects, one month, an estimated sixteen hours back.
One of the first people to run paid work through Tabor8 is a wedding and events videographer in New Zealand. Over the product's first month live he put four client projects through it. This is what he reports - and exactly how solid each number is.
The four-hours figure is his estimate of what the sorting pass used to cost him, not a measurement. Tabor8 does not instrument the workflow it replaces and cannot produce a logged before-and-after. Four projects over one month is a small sample, so we have not multiplied it into a yearly number, and there is no dollar figure here because that would mean inventing a day rate.
The work before Tabor8
His jobs are weddings and events - multi-camera, a full day each, no shot list. The edit he is paid for could not start until he had been through every file to find the clips of the couple, the families, the wedding party and whichever guests the client would ask about. That pass is the part he describes as roughly four hours of a project, done at a scrubbed fast-forward, and it is the same pass on every job.
What changed
Now the cards from every camera go up in one upload after the shoot, and the scan runs while he does something else. He comes back to a folder for each person Tabor8 found, plus a b-roll folder for the shots with nobody in them, with each clip already cut and padded. The edit starts from sorted footage instead of a folder of unnamed files.
It is not hands-off. On footage shot side-on or in low light the recognition sometimes puts one person in two folders, and he merges those himself - a couple of clicks each. He treats the first pass as removing most of the scrubbing rather than making every call for him.
The number, and what it is worth
Across the four projects he estimates about sixteen hours he would otherwise have spent scrubbing. That is one month and one operator - useful as a real data point, not as a projection. What it does show is the shape of the trade: the time it takes back is measured in hours per project, against a tool cost measured in tens of dollars a month.
This is the only case study on the site for now. More will go up as beta customers run enough work through Tabor8 to have their own numbers, and with their agreement on what is published. The positioning argument this supports is laid out on Why Tabor8.
Run one project through it and get your own number.
Apply for beta access