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So I'm editing my 3rd review at the moment.
I'm starting to see a pattern here.
It takes me about an hour to eat a ration and film it etc, and it generates raw video footage of the same duration.
The challenge then consists of editing out all the "ehh.." and "uhmm... " and nasty mouth sounds or long periods of silence and making the video short enough to not become boring.
This takes by far much longer than an hour. I'd say closer to 4 hours or something.
I use a loooot of pauses when I talk, maybe partly because I'm not speaking in my native language so I sometimes hesitate, rephrase stuff or just try to plan what to say, so everything takes a lot longer than I think it does.
This means I have to sit and cut out 1-2 second silences between a lot of words within a sentence. I figure if I do this throughout the video it's probably gonna shave a couple of useless minutes off.
It does cause some weird cuts here and there but I'm trying to make it so that it doesn't interrupt the viewing experience too much.
Guess there's just no good substitute for natural speakers.
My first MRE video is 23m19s. I tried to make the second MRE video shorter but only managed to get it down to 21m19s.
I realize since these are not only straight up reviews, but also my very first experience eating rations, it probably adds to the details that most people probably think are unnecessary.

Also, "common" items such as US MREs may not be worth 20+ minutes of video, while super rare rations may need a lot of detail, making them much longer than similarly sized MREs would warrant, right?

What's your experience with duration when it comes to actually recording the review and time spent editing it?

What do you think is a reasonable duration for an MRE review and for 24H ration reviews?

Well, to properly pace an MRE Review Video, it will seem (like many things) easy to execute at first, but in reality it's tedious and difficult.

It sounds like you have not only the right idea on this, but also getting your first MRE videos down to 20-22 minutes when you are also fairly new to the world of Military Rations, I think that is very good! You will get the hang of this and it will continue to get more enjoyable to create.


Expect to take at least 1 hour to properly film most Single Meal Rations. Editing typically runs 3-7 hours. Type up a description and title and you are looking at a total of between 4-8 hours or so.
Try to never let a single meal go over 18 minutes. The audience starts to get lost on a single meal video typically after 12 minutes - shaving the potential audience. They always click on the shortest & sweetest first.
I am personally wanting to keep my Single Meal Vids at no longer than 16 minutes and no less than 7.


Now for a 24hr Ration - if it's a Ukrainian or something simple - 2-3 hours if you split up your 3 meals - or eat throughout the day which is 3 separate 1 hour or so shoots. If it is complicated w/ many small components like a CR1M, UN 24hr, Dutch, etc..the filming is about 50%-100% longer.. smaller/more components means more time spent describing each item.
This is a harder one - 24hr Ration videos tend to do best if edited and cut down to 20-30 minutes. If you get it in at 18-19..nice. If you got it in at 31-32.. good enough.
My personal 24hr Vid run times at no more than 32 minutes, and no less than 14.

Also, your speaking will get better with performance. If you do 20-30 videos, you will see that you will get a solid hang on it, and then you can start to spot out things you do not like with your own performance, and change it. The pauses will be less and less, and you will become more comfortable with your developing Ration-reviewing persona. I dunno if any of this makes sense, you're taking advice from a crazy FL man - so consider the source.

It's comforting to hear that it takes several hours even for seasoned veterans like yourself Seems my expectations aren't too far off then.
I'll just keep on eating
Speaking of which... I realize my vids have a tendency to approach "watch me eat" vids instead of actual reviews.
I forget to comment on the flavors and my opinions while eating. It's not really a natural thing and I'm always hungry when I sit down to eat and record, so talking isn't my primary instinct at that point

I agree with Steve. The duration you achieved is really good. I noticed that if I make a review in parts - the first part has significantly more views than the next ones.

There are moments in the video, which should be deleted - chewing, making photos etc. First I was stopping the camera every time, now I record this and put a vocal mark for editing (saying a keyword). Then in the editing software I can see the voice wave together with the picture and I can easilyfind this point and delete the film between marks

Yeah, tasting, recording, setup....easily 1-2 hours.

One thing ive found easy is stopping the camera whenever i need to transition. Setting up the unboxing, pause while I set up tray and start reheat (if reheats not filmed) and during any pauses longer than about a minute. That gives the added bonus of having several smaller clips to transition than one huge one.

Some things will streamline with practice. Just keep at it.

Gotta come back to this...
I'm about to post my first Swedish ration review (computer is rendering).
It's a 4 course ration and I had to split it into 2 separate videos
1- Unpacking + dinner + evening meal
2- Breakfast + lunch

OK, my intro/outro anthems add about a minute and a half, but I still end up with almost 31 minutes duration on the first video, and it looks like the second one will reach 21 minutes...
I feel it's hard to do any proper reviewing while at the same time keeping it short. I need time to show, explain and describe the experience.
I keep telling myself that the first ration from a given country will always be longer and more detailed than subsequent ones, since there's less new stuff to discover and describe in them. I sure hope so.

In all my raw footage I talk like Christopher Walken (word, pause, word, pause, word, pause, burst of words, pause for rephrasing, word, pause, ...) so I am cutting out little bits AALLL over, like hundreds of small cuts.
Like I said before, it's probably mostly due to that English is not my native language so it slows down my speech a bit as I'm searching for words and expressions.
It really adds hours and HOURS to the editing time as well... This is hard work!

I also realize I comment on each thing 3 times: 1st while consuming it, 2nd in the summary comments at the end of the meal when all components are done and 3rd during the anthem in the end in text form.
This may be a bit redundant, but I really feel the end anthem with rolling text review is a nice and relatively short and concise summary while the summary after each meal is also good since some things are best described after you've consumed them entirely, and of course reviewing while eating/drinking is hard to avoid... In any case, the anthem+text review is at the end of the video so it's easy to skip if you think it's getting too long/boring to watch

Not sure what I wanted to say with this post more than sharing my thoughts.
Most reviews of Swedish rations I've seen do reach over 40 minutes in total.
Crombat rations did a 3-part review of a 4-course ration in a total of ~32 minutes which I think is pretty good.

Noteworthy:
emmymadeinjapan reviews a Swedish 3 course ration in 13 minutes 42 seconds, though she doesn't do any initial unpacking or split it into separate meals, but rather takes out and eats each item in one go (except the meals that need heating), films her face as she bites into something and gives it a few comments, then moves on to the next item.

crazyrussianhacker tears through a Swedish 3 course ration in 10 minutes 39 seconds, including a quick unpacking in the beginning. He does everything in parallel and shoves everything in his mouth, quick comment "boom! wow! i like it!", next. All the actual reviewing from starting to prepare the first meal to finishing the gum (and burp) is 6m20s.

Not saying it's better, but it's interesting to see it "can be done" in a lot shorter time than most of the MRE community reviewers do at the cost of details, but he still manages to comment on everything.
It seems the MRE-community guys do longer reviews. Maybe because we're more interested in the subject, while others just try it out and give short comments.
Non-MRE-community people probably don't have enough interest in the subject to sit and watch ration reviews that go on for longer than like 15 minutes.
That could be an important difference.

Just finished watching the Swedish Menu 17 videos mate and I enjoyed it, I'm hopefully going to start doing video reviews soon so this thread as helped a lot with tips, cheers for that guys.

As for the language thing, don't worry about so much, I'm quite envious you have a really subtle accent when speaking English, I don't despite being British, I'm not English, I'm Welsh and have a strong accent and I speak very fast which I need to tone down to be really understood, had to do it at University as I was living with people from all over, England, US, France and some Welsh people but not from my area.

I need help.
I might have to change the way I do reviews. This is becoming way too time consuming. Not that I have a job that needs the time... but still.. editing almost feels like a job... minus the pay

This is my video editing timeline for the first UK 24H ORP review I'm doing.
Granted, it's bit longer than what the subsequent ones will be (First ration from a country tends to be longer), but currently the duration is 43m39s ...
I'm gonna go through it and from start to finish and see if there are any large sections I can remove...
But still, editing this this took days, and I didn't even put the intro/outro in yet


All the gray/black stuff obviously isn't actual gray/black scenes. It's clips that are too short to preview, so it's several short clips displayed as blocks in the timeline...

My narration is still like Christopher Walken with tons of pauses and rephrasing. I need to do all these little cuts, and it's killing me.

Just wanted to whine a bit...