How many words is a 60-second video? Paste the script and read the clock

At 130 words a minute, a 60-second video is about 130 words. A 30-second video is about 65, and a 90-second video is about 195.

That 130 is an assumption, not a law. It is the middle of the range most people land in when they talk to a camera, and every number on this page scales with it.

A careful explainer pace of 110 words a minute fits 110 words into the same 60 seconds. A quick, caffeinated 150 fits 150.

So the honest answer to the question is a range. A 60-second video holds somewhere between 110 and 150 words for almost everybody.

The table below runs both ends of that range, so you can see how far apart they sit at every common length.

The timer above ends the guessing entirely. Paste the actual script, set the pace, and read the actual runtime.

The formula is one multiplication. Words divided by pace, times sixty, gives seconds. That is all the timer above is doing.

It slips in known places, and knowing them keeps the estimate honest.

Pauses are not words. A script delivered with deliberate beats runs longer than the count suggests, sometimes by a tenth.

Numbers and abbreviations expand out loud. The figure 1,995 is one word on the page and four in the mouth.

And timing a script by reading it silently reliably underestimates the runtime, because reading aloud is slower than reading in your head.

None of that changes the planning answer. It changes the safety margin: land a few words under the target rather than a few over.

Most scripts arrive over the target, because writing long is easier than writing short.

At 130 words a minute, every sentence you cut buys back about six seconds. Two sentences is the difference between a 75-second draft and a 60-second video.

Cut in a fixed order. First the second example, because one example carries the point as well as two. Then the throat-clearing opening, because the real first line is usually sitting in sentence three.

Keep the claim, the proof and the instruction. Everything else in the script is a candidate.

Do not speed up to fit. A script forced into a target at 170 words a minute sounds like an emergency broadcast, and the pace was never the problem.

The over-under line in the timer does this arithmetic for you. It says how many words stand between the draft and the target, and roughly how many sentences that is.

The default pace here is 130 words a minute because it is the middle of the normal range, not because it is yours.

Your real pace takes half a minute to measure. Read a short passage out loud at the companion pace test at /tools/speaking-pace-test and it computes your words a minute from an actual read.

This timer picks the measurement up automatically. Once a pace is saved on your device, the slider starts there and says so.

Measured beats assumed by a surprising margin. Two speakers reading the same script can finish about twenty seconds apart on a one-minute read.

The pace is stored in your own browser and nowhere else. The script you paste is never stored at all.

A script that lands on the target is a script ready to film. Say it to a phone camera in one take of up to three minutes.

Cutroom turns that one take into a finished 9:16 video. The transcript drives the cut, captions land word by word, and b-roll covers the phrases you highlight.

The script arithmetic keeps working after filming, on the transcript. If the take runs long, delete a line you do not want and the cut rebuilds around it.

Change the pace of the edit and the machine re-cuts the whole thing, which is how one script becomes a 45-second version and a 60-second version in the same afternoon.

The pricing is the same multiplication as the timer. One batch is 100 credits and the export is 20 credits per output minute, so a 60-second finished video is about 120 credits.

Three finished videos are free inside your first seven days, no card, on the 600 credits granted at signup, and they export with a Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits — about ten of those finished one-minute videos, and more when they run shorter.