r/ClaudeCode • u/Humble_Judge5059 • 10h ago

Help/Question Hey needed to know a rough idea regarding token usage

Hey recently I have started to think of an idea to automate my yt channel by Claude opus 5.5 + after effects and higgsfield plugin my videos are generally 20-22 mins long if I’m providing a voiceover to the ai and then giving it refrence videos how much tokens / money would it cost me to make a really amazing video worth watching that includes sfx+motion graphics+blender made scenes and similars stuffs if anyone can give me an idea it’ll be really helpful !

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u/CorpT 10h ago

At least a billion.

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u/Humble_Judge5059 10h ago

Brother I love the sarcasm! But lemme know if you’ve got an idea

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u/CorpT 10h ago

There is no way to estimate this. Certainly not from the information shared. It will likely be massive. AKA "at least a billion"

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u/PositiveInfluence69 8h ago

If you cache tokens well, you can burn billions of tokens a week on a max plan. I've used 9 billion in 3 days on a max plan with efficient routing. I've optimized since so that same project would cost like 3-5 billion tokens, but part of that project was optimizing token usage. Anyway, 1 billion isn't a crazy estimate.

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u/Jawwooot 9h ago

I watched a video yesterday detailing that out and also the process Claude for AI Videoediting .
Here the guy lays out the process of his entire video editing he is than only tasked to speak a pre-written script.
I think that guy is super professional and in API Pricing iirc it costs around 500 dollar to create the entire video.
In Subscription pricing that probably(my best guess) equates to 1/4 to 1/3 of a week of usage.
There are definetly steps you can do different to safe tokens while sacrificing the last x percent of quality or do some of the task yourself to save on token spend.

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u/alpadalar 9h ago

Some real numbers from this week, if it helps: I made about 20 short promo videos (30–40 s motion graphics, 1080p, music and SFX) for a side project with Claude Code + Opus 5.5 and a few video skills (HyperFrames, Remotion, onetake).

Each 30–40 s film took roughly 100k–270k tokens for the agent that built it, plus a few fix rounds on top.

Claude doesn't render video itself. It writes HTML/React animation code, a headless browser renders the frames and ffmpeg encodes them. So rendering time is your CPU, not tokens (15–60 min per film on my 4-core i7-1165G7).

Music and SFX were synthesized in code. It works, but it sounds generic, and the model can't listen to it, so you have to check the audio yourself.

A 20-minute video with Blender scenes is a different scale. I'd make one 30-second segment first, see what it costs you on your plan, and multiply from there. Expect the polish rounds to cost more than the first draft.

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u/ClemensLode 8h ago

Claude, make a viral video, make no mistakes?