Key takeaways:
AI makes video editing faster and easier
AI can replace specific mundane editing tasks
Anyone can make professional edits with AI
Yes, artificial intelligence is here! As we covered in part one of our AI video creation series, AI isn’t here to replace content creators but rather to make parts of the creation process easier, saving businesses and creators time and money.
In this piece, we’ll walk through some of the major ways AI video editing makes it faster and easier than ever to edit video. If you want to get an idea of how much time and money can be saved, check out our piece on the ROI of automated editing.
For those ready to see exactly what AI can do, let’s dive in.
The benefits of AI video editing tools
As we mentioned before, many AI-powered video editing tools refer to themselves as “magic.” This great innovation can seem mystical, but it has very real business uses and benefits.
The true magic isn’t in how AI makes a specific task within video editing easier but rather in how all the features combine to make it easier to create more video content.
As Vimeo called out in the unveiling of their AI-powered editing tools, 80% of people prefer videos over written text.
This means that better editing tools benefit an audience that craves more video. Making it easier to create video removes the barrier many people have to leveraging the most impactful form of digital communication.
With AI editing tools, creating video is no longer a cumbersome, specialized task. Empowering everyone to create on their own, without an expert involved in every part of the process, lowers overall costs and improves the ROI of each piece of content.
Types of AI video editing tools
There are a number of ways AI transforms video editing, but let’s focus on six that the majority of business users can leverage right now without any video editing experience.
Automated captions and transcripts
AI can be used to automatically generate caption and transcript files. The machine pulls from the audio track of the video to generate .srt and .txt files with timing.
If you’ve ever had to manually transcribe long videos and manually add captions — you’re welcome.
Text-based editing
As the AI creates a transcript, it pairs the words and timings to the picture and audio in the editor, so you can really think of this as “transcription-based video editing.”
Rather than scrubbing through a timeline to make changes, simply select text on screen to edit the video. It’s important to note that text-based editing is just the user-friendly version of the editor. The traditional editing timeline still exists for more precise edits.
Automated video summarization and chaptering
As it generates a transcript, AI can repurpose the text to create a quick overview of the content within the video. The AI uses the transcript’s timings and text to create sections and titles for key moments and topics throughout the video.
Disfluency removal
AI can automatically remove long pauses, stumbles, filler words, and portions of video that clearly won’t make the final cut.
Color matching
Balancing the color between multiple pieces of video can be especially tricky, but AI can automatically match the color between different clips. With a click of a button, sync up color profiles and temperatures automatically.
Auto templates
By setting up templates in advance, paired with AI “understanding” the content of the recording, AI can automatically suggest or apply branding such as custom intros, outros, graphics, and lower thirds to create a final video.
The main thing that most video editors will recognize here — these are all tasks that require a specific bit of expertise but are often repetitive, low-stakes tasks.
If a creator is short on time, they might not touch up each subtle color correction, they may let the social media site auto-generate (usually hit-or-miss) captions, and would possibly disregard chapters for the final video.
Each of the mentioned tools does a specific task that would have previously been delegated to a low-level copywriter, designer, or intern in an ideal situation. Otherwise, this is work that’s well beneath the skill set of a seasoned professional.
Let the machine do the grunt work and let the pros focus on those complex edits. Simply manage those dull tasks rather than making them hands-on edits.
Faster editing with AI tools
Great, so we have these AI video editing tools, now how do they speed up the process?
Every individual works at their own pace and each situation is unique, but here are some industry averages for traditional forms of editing and how much time AI can save editors. This is the baseline to determining the ROI of AI video editing.
Saving time with automated captions and transcripts
Multiple sources agree that for every minute of video, it takes five to ten minutes to create a final caption file. That might not sound like much, but that’s someone who regularly creates captions and is used to that workflow taking 5x – 10x the length of the video.
A much more scalable approach is to have AI produce the V1 of the captions and then have someone edit it, which can be done end-to-end for even lengthy content in minutes.
Rather than scrolling through the video and typing along as the audio goes, it’s much quicker to simply refine an existing caption file. AI removes that burden from people and produces a file nearly instantly.
Intuitive text-based editing
As we’ve said before, video editing is difficult for people unfamiliar with the tools and best practices in place. Even if you know what you’re doing, it might take between 30 minutes and a couple of hours to edit each minute of video. Every second saved while editing each minute of video can make a huge difference.
Text-based editors make it a visual experience. No need to have the perfect headphones to listen to the audio as you scroll through, searching for portions you should keep or cut. Edit the script just like you would a document, and AI will apply your changes.
Automatic video summaries and chapters
Similar to captioning, coming up with a sufficient video summary and creating chapters for each moment is a hands-on, manual process. While it might not be as exhaustive as captioning, writing the description and coming up with the best moments requires, well, consuming the entire video.
Have fun with that one, podcasters.
With AI using the automated transcript to create segments, you have a great starting point. Rather than manually keyframing each moment, you automatically have a description and chapters from the start.
Automatically remove stumbles
Google points to research that states there’s a 50% chance for disfluency in a sentence of 10 – 13 words. Meaning, if your job is to clean up stutters, repetitions, long pauses, and mistakes throughout a lengthy recording, you likely have a lot of work ahead of you.
Automatically removing some, if not all, of those blemishes, means that editors simply don’t have to worry about going on a search-and-destroy mission for each of those moments.
Automated color balancing
In most cases, it takes a professional to catch coloring inconsistencies. It’s why in large productions, one of the first things each camera operator is told by the director is to white balance their camera. And that’s in an environment where all the recording devices are uniform.
It takes a very keen eye to catch slight imbalances across different videos captured across a variety of devices.
Since color grading and temperature can both be calculated, AI can do a much better job of catching those slight inconsistencies and balancing them. Rather than having a professional go through each clip with a fine-tooth comb, the clips are automatically color corrected.
Automatically apply graphics and branding
Manually applying graphics is mundane, mindless work. While non-experts can be trained on how to apply lower thirds, branding, and other visuals created ahead of time, it still takes time to apply and then render those changes in a timeline editor.
Those quick changes can be automatically applied, taking that workflow from minutes down to an instant. By using AI to automatically apply templates, those additions are made in an automated zero-touch workflow.
Empowering everyone to edit with AI
Perhaps the most impactful part of automated editing tools is that they make each task simple for anyone to manage parts of the editing process.
Captioning made easy
With one click of a button, anyone can produce transcripts and captions. This makes adding subtitles or on-screen captions quick for anyone.
User-friendly editing
Timeline editors are very specific to video editing, but anyone can rearrange text in a way that makes sense. Quick edits, such as rearranging parts of the story or cutting out entire sections, is easier for everyone.
Instantly call out moments in content
Many people outside of content creators might not notice descriptions and chapters in videos they consume online. Without a second thought, it’s easy to have those helpful navigable bits of information tied to the video.
Fix disfluencies and mistakes
Just the word “disfluency” is real inside baseball. Catching those stumbles might not be difficult, but stitching the footage around them together in a way that makes sense sure is. Leave it to the AI to catch and fix those mistakes.
Color corrections anyone can do
If the term “white balancing” goes over your head, that’s OK. Without needing to determine if a clip is warmer or cooler than the others, the AI will handle them for you.
Zero-touch post-production
We think “zero-touch post-production” speaks for itself. AI makes those easy, standardized branding additions so you don’t have to.
With this in mind, video creators without specific editing expertise can still do parts of the editing process — or can even be self-sufficient in video editing.
Easier video editing for everyone with AI
AI video editing tools are to video what the Crock-Pot and Air Fryer are to cooking. While you still need the right ingredients and should probably follow the guidance of a professional, pretty much anyone can create a masterpiece in moments.
Ideally, businesses will empower individuals to create without over-reliance on video experts, leveraging the pros as creative oversight rather than tacticians, making the entire process more cost-effective.
Text-based editing makes video editing as simple as cleaning up copy in a Word doc.
Auto-applied templates and graphics, color corrections, and chaptering all speed up manual parts of the editing process that take time but not necessarily tons of expertise.
These are just a few examples of how editing video with AI powers a user-friendly editing experience — but even this AI-driven experience isn’t radically different from what we’re already used to. AI just makes the entire process faster and allows everyone to pull off professional edits.
To see how AI video editing works, take a look at our recorded demo of the Editor.
