From four hours of video editing to about 20 minutes

A timestamp tool that turned recorded Scaler classes into reusable topic clips and removed the need for a planned ten-person editing team.

My role. Led the remedial-class program as product manager, defined the class format and built the tool.

Results

End-to-end cycle, down from ~4 hours: ~20 min
Human input per video: 10–15 min
Planned 10-editor hiring cost avoided: ~₹6 lakh/mo
Two-hour classes turned into subtopics: 300+ → 2,000+

The teaching existed. Preparing it was the bottleneck

Scaler wanted to run remedial classes using material from previous recordings. Short topic clips could play through the existing live-class setup, with a teaching assistant available for questions.

The initial plan was to hire ten video editors. Instructors would explain the cuts, editors would trim and render, and someone would approve the output. Explaining one edit could take an instructor about 30 minutes. Misunderstood technical terms caused wrong cuts and rework, bringing the full cycle to roughly four hours per class.

I asked for time to build a tool instead. The person who understood the lesson already knew where each topic began and ended.

Illustration of a two-hour class recording with three marked spans, each becoming a separate topic clip.

Keep the judgement with the instructor

In m3u8editor, the instructor enters the timestamps they want to keep. FFmpeg handles trimming and cropping locally, then packages the clips into a ZIP file.

There is no need to explain the edit to another person or transfer files between instructor and editor. Human input takes about 10–15 minutes per class; the full cycle takes about 20 minutes.

The tool with a class recording loaded, its duration, the player, and start time 00:00:12, end time 00:01:05 and segment number 3.

A smaller workflow made the program practical

More than 300 two-hour classes were broken into over 2,000 subtopics. The planned editing team, budgeted at about ₹6 lakh a month, was no longer needed.

Content teams and other teams at Scaler also began using the tool directly. The clearest results are the faster editing cycle, the topic library it produced and the hiring cost avoided. Ongoing usage across self-hosted instances is not centrally tracked.

Illustration comparing the reported editing cycle: about four hours with editors against about twenty minutes with the tool.