Vanpelt Studio: a video production team for $29 a month.

Vanpelt Studio is the studio's own product, and the tool every video on this site is planned with. It started as a private beta for long-form structure. It is now a desktop app you can download, at $29 a month, with the AI included and nothing to set up.

Long-form is a structure problem

Shorts are an editing problem. The eight, fifteen and thirty-minute videos are a structure problem, and structure is exactly where a solo creator has no team to lean on. Every long-form creator knows the wall: hours of dead footage and no way through it.

A studio would put several people on a video before anyone touched a timeline. The product is organised around those roles rather than around features, because the roles are what a solo creator is actually missing.

Before the shoot

Decide what the video is.

• -Writer: turns the idea into a beat sheet, a script and a shot list
• -Packaging: drafts titles and thumbnails, and pressure-tests them

After the shoot

Find out what you actually got.

• -Assistant editor: transcribes and indexes every clip on your machine
• -Story editor: checks the footage against the plan and names the gaps

After it airs

Learn something you can use.

• -Analyst: reads the retention graph and names the beat that lost them

The centre of the app is the comparison between those last two columns: your list, graded against what the memory card actually holds. Holes surface the same evening, while a pickup is still a twenty-minute job, rather than on day twelve when they cost the week.

Local-first, by design

Your footage never leaves your machine. Transcription runs on device with Whisper, ffmpeg handles the media, and only derived text, meaning transcripts and the beat sheet rather than raw media, is sent to a model for reasoning. It runs on macOS and Windows, and works with Claude, GPT and open models.

That constraint is not a privacy slogan, it is what makes the assistant-editor role affordable. Indexing a full memory card by uploading it is slow and expensive; indexing it locally is neither.

What shipped alongside it

Two things came out of making the channel's own videos and are now free on the studio site.

The free creator course is eleven modules and more than fifty lessons covering thumbnails, titles, ideas, story and scripting. Every lesson is open.

The free LUT pack is the set of grades built for the channel's own films, written from scratch in code and tuned frame by frame, published as .cube files you can use in anything including monetised work. The Retro Surf and Horror Green looks are the grades from the surf movie and the horror short.

Why the studio builds its own tools

There is a loop here that is the whole point of the business. The channel produces videos, the videos surface problems in the process, the product solves those problems, and the product then gets tested against the next video before any customer sees it.

Client work sits inside the same loop. A launch film for a company is planned in the same app, with the same beat sheet and the same story check, which means the process being sold is the process actually used.

The full build story is in the case study. If you want the twenty-minute version in person, the walkthrough is booked from the product page.

Sources and further reading

• The free YouTube creator course

  Vanpelt StudioEleven modules, open, no email required.

• Free cinematic LUTs for S-Log3, C-Log3 and V-Log

  Vanpelt StudioThe grades from the channel’s own films, as .cube files, licensed for monetised use.

• How YouTube actually pays creators in 2026

  Vanpelt StudioThe revenue splits and Partner Program changes behind the economics a solo creator is planning against.