I've built a lot of reusable editing templates over the years, and a genuine minority of them actually get used regularly enough to have been worth the setup time. Worth being honest about which categories of template actually pay off versus which ones sounded efficient but never quite fit real project needs closely enough to matter.
What earns its keep: structural templates, not stylistic ones
A template built around project structure, bin organization, standard sequence settings, a consistent naming convention, gets used on essentially every single project regardless of how different the content is, because that structural overhead is the same tedious setup work no matter what the video is actually about. A template built around a specific visual style, a particular title animation, a specific color look, gets used far less often, because visual style genuinely varies more from project to project than the underlying organizational needs do.
Where I was wrong about what would save time
I spent real hours early on building elaborate templated sequences with placeholder graphics and animated lower thirds, expecting to reuse them constantly. In practice, most projects need those elements customized enough per client that the template became a starting point I heavily modified rather than a true time-saver, and I'd have been better off building a simpler, more modular version from the start instead of an elaborate one I kept fighting to adapt.
- Structural templates: bin organization, naming, sequence settings, used on nearly everything
- Elaborate stylistic templates: often over-engineered, used less than expected
- Simple, modular pieces beat one elaborate all-in-one template most of the time
What I actually build now
My template library now leans heavily modular, small individual pieces, a title style, a lower third style, a standard export preset, that combine differently per project rather than one rigid master template trying to anticipate every need in advance. It's a less impressive-looking system than a polished all-in-one template, and it's genuinely served real project variety better than the elaborate version I started with.