When you look at lists of video editing services – or simply type “video editing services” into Google – Video Husky is one of the first results that pops up.
Unsurprisingly. Video Husky is one of the best-known video editing services out there. Especially when it comes to unlimited video editing. That means you can have as many videos as you want edited every month in return for a fixed subscription price. (At least in theory!)
But does it live up to the hype? We made it our mission to find out for you. For our Video Husky review, we signed up and had a video edited.
What we wanted to know: Are Video Husky edits actually that good, their service that fast, and the edits that unlimited? And – is it really all that cheap?
Well, you get what you pay for.
Here’s the scoop!
Want to skip straight to the video edit we got, and compare it to our own version? Click here!
Contents
The Scenario: Vlog Editor Needed
For the purpose of our review, let’s pretend you’re a content creator on YouTube.
You’ve just gone on a road trip with a friend, hiking to a beautiful lake. Now you want to share that experience with your channel audience – and you need a professional video editor to spin the raw footage into solid video gold.
You’ve also already uploaded all your footage into your Google Drive, along with some basic editing instructions. You want a fast-paced, silly clip full of funny pop-ups, text in swooping fonts, and happy, upbeat music. Overall, the final video should run to about 6–7 minutes.
In addition, you’ve included your channel assets – logo, intro, outro – and a past video so that the editor will be able to gauge your style.
You want to post your video in about a week, so the turnaround time should be as fast as possible while still producing a high-quality edit.
This is the same setup we used for our Upwork freelancer review, by the way.
Let’s see what Video Husky can do with the same brief.
Related: See the overview page collecting all our video editing service reviews and comparisons!
Finding Video Husky, Hunting for Pricing Information
Finding Video Husky is easy. If you’re a creator on the hunt for a video editing company, pretty much every list of video editing services or Google search will lead you to their website.
Choosing a plan is much trickier.
Video Husky offers “unlimited” video editing subscriptions. For a set price, you can have as many videos as you want edited every month.
Spoiler: There’s fine print. A lot of it. All the asterisks in their service descriptions are an indication of that.
What makes it even more frustrating is that Video Husky offers infuriatingly few pricing details on their website.
Once you’ve clicked away annoying popups and an even more annoying chatbot, it still takes forever to pinpoint package pricing and compare it.
Even after you find the page listing the different subscription plans, you’ll have to click on each one and scroll past endless details and calculations to get to how much it will actually cost you.
Why? It’s because the site tries hard to get you to schedule a sales call rather than just giving you straightforward information. (And we’ll be coming back to that call…)
We got your back. To save you that frustration, here’s a broad overview of Video Husky’s pricing.
Plans | Pom | Eskimo | Siberian |
---|---|---|---|
$/month | $549 | $749 | $1,590 |
Max. runtime | 10 mins | 20 mins | 30 mins |
Max. footage | 20 mins 20GB |
60 mins 40 GB |
120 mins 100 GB |
Resolution | 1080p | 1080p | 4K |
Revisions | 3 | unlimited | unlimited |
Turnaround | 2 days | 1-2 days | 1-2 days |
Additionally, there’s an agency-oriented ‘St. Bernard’ plan with pricing on request.
By the way: Thumbnails and subtitles aren’t included for Pom and Eskimo, but you can add them for $109/month extra – each.
Video Husky’s “Unlimited” Editing
Now for the “unlimited” editing. True, you can submit as many video editing requests as you want. But these will be queued: Your editor will only work on them one after the other, because you only have one editor!
If you actually want multiple videos edited simultaneously, you need to add another subscription.
Yikes.
Now, this unlimited plan could still be worth it, compared to per-video or package pricing. But that depends on how many videos your Video Husky’s editor can complete – one after the other – in a month.
This makes the total turnaround time really important: everything between submitting the request to downloading the final video, including revision rounds.
Let’s take a look at how long that ended up taking in our case.
The Hoops Begin - (Broken) Onboarding Calls, Wrike, and Forms
We eventually opt for the $749/month Eskimo plan, simply because our raw footage is longer than 30 minutes. Doing the sort of travel Vlog we wanted, there was simply no way to keep it any shorter than that.
Choosing the plan and paying for it was relatively straightforward. However, straight after comes the first hurdle.
We thought we’d managed to avoid having to schedule calls before placing our video editing order. Apparently not.
Immediately after we complete our payment, we’re prompted to book an onboarding call. Ugh. We want our video edited, asap. That has to be possible without scheduling valuable face-to-face time.
It turns out, it doesn’t matter either way. The Calendly link for the onboarding call is broken.
Yippee.
Before we have too much time to stew in our frustration, we get an email in our inbox. Asking us to book that call (with the same broken link!) and to sign up for Wrike.
With no alternative, we pick the latter option – signing up for Wrike.
Now, Wrike is the project management software Video Husky uses to handle video orders.
We had to create yet another account and accept their invitation before we could begin submitting editing requests. Cumbersome, but there we go. And at least there was a tutorial video in one of Video Husky’s emails.
Once we were done signing up, our Wrike dashboard looked like this.
Submitting the video editing order
To start our video editing request, we click the green ‘+’ button at the top right. Then we pick the right form to fill out – because that depends on what plan the customer purchased. For us, that’s the “Eskimo Projects Request Form 2.0”.
The form itself is self-explanatory, but long. It includes entire paragraphs of caveats, and a legend for emojis used to denote the status.
We fill the form. We read the fine print. We provide all the information required – from a thorough creative brief and specifics on the video length, format, subtitle requirements, tone, resolution, aspect ratio, creative directions, and template videos. After about 40 minutes, we’re done.
Phew.
At last, we hit submit and get a confirmation that our order has been added to our queue. Let’s finally get this show on the road!
One thing is clear already at this point, though. The promise on the website that “it’s super simple and extremely fast to get started with Video Husky”?
Figuring out the platform and filling in the order took the better part of an hour – and we’d already prepared all that information in advance.
And now, we wait.
Video Husky promises a 1-2 day turnaround time. We put in our order on a Friday. So we can expect to see a first draft by the end of the weekend, review it, and hopefully get the final video uploaded by the middle of next week. Right?
Nope.
Editor Communication - Weekend Delays and Missed Calls
Video Husky’s entire editing team is located in the Philippines (that’s GMT +8). And they don’t work weekends.
So even though we submitted our order on Friday the 10th, we couldn’t feasibly hear back by Monday the 13th. We probably wouldn’t see a draft before Wednesday the 15th.
But even that didn’t happen. By Thursday, we were getting impatient and ready to send a follow-up message.
But Video Husky did get there first.
The reason work hadn’t even begun on our order? We hadn’t gone through the DAMN ONBOARDING CALL.
In addition to the onboarding call they kept insisting on, we were also asked to fill out a client profile form for the Eskimo plan, a lot of which we’d already put into our video order form. The virtual paperwork just kept on stacking up.
At last, our first interaction with our editors happened on Friday, the 17th – a full week after submitting the order. By that time, we were running out of patience. We’d hoped to have our video edited and ready to post already.
Even that message was only to let us know that the project had been assigned and the work begun. And, of course, it wouldn’t be continued until the following Monday, the 20th.
They did give us a nice work breakdown, though.
The First Draft and Video Husky’s Review Tool
At last, we got the first draft of our video on Tuesday the 21st. A solid 11 days after we submitted our initial request.
By now, “unlimited” video editing looks less like a bargain and more like rotten clickbait.
At this rate, we wouldn’t get more than 2 videos edited that month (if that). At $749/month, that’s about $375 for each video. That’s a lot more than a video editing company with per-video pricing would charge on a similar order.
As for the quality of the draft… let’s have a look:
By that time, our writer was on the go. Given Video Husky’s promised turnaround time, we’d anticipated that editing would be done already, and they’d booked a trip.
That meant we only got round to reviewing the draft three days later.
It was alright-ish.
The video was too long. The intro too simple. The transitions repetitive. And the sound effects, text overlays, and graphics we’d wanted to make it fun and entertaining? They were missing entirely.
So we started compiling our comments.
The first round of feedback
Video Husky offers a video review tool that lets you mark specific elements in a video and leave comments directly in the timeline. This works because they upload your clip directly to their YouTube channel as an unlisted video. (We’ll get back to that in a sec.)
While that tool is handy for very specific comments, most of ours were general, so we left them directly in the chat on Wrike.
Now, about them uploading the videos to YouTube, even unlisted?
This means that every video appears on Video Husky’s channel first, and YouTube will see it as the “original”. If they wanted to, they could file a copyright removal request – and get that same video taken off your channel.
Video Editing Review: Video Husky’s Second Draft
We left our comments on the 24th. A Friday again, alas. That meant that once again there was the weekend plus the regular turnaround between us and the next draft of our video.
We got another progress update on the 27th. This was accompanied by a notification that our dedicated video editor would go on vacation for a few days.
That happens, and they are providing a replacement.
But they also told us that the entirety of Video Husky would be taking time off the week after that.
The next day, Tuesday the 28th, we also finally received the second draft of our video. It was still somewhat uninspired.
Take a look.
The intro remains lackluster, with an awkward paper animation and an odd font. Some parts of the video – like around 1:00 – look overexposed, due to a poor attempt at color grading.
Plus, the transitions are still too simple, mostly wipes. And there are too many long stretches of the video where nothing happens except talk, barely alleviated by background music.
The only thing that is dotted throughout the video aplenty are emoji overlays. To the point of being nauseating.
Given the improvements between the first and second draft, we estimate that it would take at least another two rounds of editing to get the video entirely up to our standards.
Or, on Video Husky time, probably another two weeks, given the weekend and the upcoming holidays.
In the face of these looming delays, we capitulate and call it a day.
It’s time for a verdict.
Video Husky Review: Friendly, But Way Too Slow and Basic
Overall, our experience with Video Husky was frustrating on three counts.
First, the difficulties of getting started – between long forms and broken links for apparently obligatory on-boarding calls.
Second, the endless delays due to weekends and looming holidays made for a snail-pace turnaround. All in all, it took us 17 days from submitting a video editing request to getting to a halfway decent end product.
Third, “halfway decent” is still sub-par quality. We effectively paid a full month’s worth for just this one video, and we still couldn’t put it on a channel without embarrassing ourselves.
The one bright spot in our experience was that the editors we communicated with were always prompt and friendly. And getting updates on how editing was advancing was definitely nice.
If you need a project handled quickly and without administrative hurdles or weekend delays, Video Husky is not the right choice. Especially not if you value quality.
Bonus: Our Video Edit vs. Theirs
Our shorter, snappier edit.
Video Husky’s edit is long and lackluster.
This review is part of a full Tasty Edits vs. Video Husky comparison. For this, we gave our editors the exact same brief.
Here you can see their edit – and the one by our team – side by side.
FAQs
Yes and no. Video Husky offers unlimited video editing in return for a monthly subscription fee. However, you only have one editor, who works on one project at a time. Given delays between drafts and the fact that editors don’t work on weekends, you can realistically expect to have two or three videos edited per month.
Unlimited video editing means you pay a monthly subscription and submit as many video editing orders as you want in return. However, most “unlimited” plans come with caveats. The most common is that you only have one editor and can only submit one order at a time. This places a very real cap on how many videos you can have edited in a month.
Video Husky promises a first draft within 1-2 days. However, if initial edits are complex, this can be longer. Plus, editors don’t work on weekends. So if you submit your order on a Friday, for instance, you won’t see a draft until the following Tuesday or Wednesday.
Video Husky states a turnaround time of 1-2 days. This is for basic edits – more involved edits will take longer. Additionally, editors won’t work weekends and observe holidays. On a Friday order, you might not see a draft until the middle of the next week.