3 AI Apps For Video Editors.
Some in the film and video industry think of Artificial Intelligence as something out of a Terminator Movie. They see a future where machines take our jobs before enslaving us. I have a more optimistic view of AI Apps for Video Editors (At least for the time being).
In the last few months I found a set of very useful tools . I’ve tried them first hand and I was pretty impressed. But, as always, there’s still room for improvement. Some of these apps are not exactly video apps per-se but I’ve found them to be extremely useful in my video editing workflows
Topaz Gigapixel AI is quite the mouthful, however, it packs a serious punch. Gigapixel AI enlarges digital images leveraging artificial intelligence. The software does one thing, and it does it well most of the times.
I used Gigapixel AI while working on a Documentary earlier this year, and it helped me solve a major problem.
The Costa Rican National Archives has a large collection of photos. However, these photos were digitized to very low-resolution files back in the day before HD and 4K production was widespread.
Needless to say, larger resolution images were required for the documentary. But, to make things worse, I wasn’t allowed to use my own scanner and the process to have the Archive’s staff scan the images would take weeks.
Faced with the challenges of Latin American bureaucracies, technology came to the rescue.
I used Gigapixel AI to work with images roughly the size of a 720p frame and I achieved very decent results for the most part. The solution allowed me to “Ken-Burns” my way through otherwise unusable images.
Photoshop is the industry standard for Image Editing; Photoshop will do anything from photo enlargement to 3D paint and it takes about 3.1 GB of hard drive space to install on your PC. In contrast, Gigapixel AI takes 1.46 GB of space and it only does enlargement. That’s a specialist tool.
However, AI isn’t magic at all. Gigapixel AI would sometimes create unusable results. On occasion, it made mistakes on how to fill certain parts of the image. In cases such as those, it was best to go back to Photoshop for a more believable but lower-quality result.
To be fair some of the worst results I got came from lower resolution images. When it came to up-scaling high-res images (higher than UHD) the results were quite impressive.
All things considered, this is a good AI app for Video Editors and post-production professionals to keep in their toolkit.
AIVA is a website using Artificial Intelligence to create music you can use on your video edits.
I first heard about AIVA.ai on a TED talk. Entrepreneur Pierre Barreu, was telling the story of how his team trained a neural network to create creating music. I knew I had to try it ASAP.
Listen to some of the music AIVA has created
Although there are other alternatives out there, including Elon Musk’s OpenAI MuseNet . I prefer AIVA simply because it’s productized. Which means you can use the music created by AIVA’s artificial intelligence in your commercial video projects. And it costs 39.99 per month
You can still try AIVA for free, it’s worth trying. Keep in mind you’ll be limited to 3 downloads a month. And those tracks can’t be used commercially.
AIVA’s team is currently working on a new feature, allowing you to upload a music track to use as a reference so that AIVA can create a similar track.
Again, this is another promising AI tool for video editors to keep in their arsenal.
We’ve all seen those popular videos on social media used by news outlets which are driven mostly by images and animated text. Companies like FOX, SkyScanner and Shopify all use similar tools, but we hardly ever wonder how they really work.
Lumen 5 can take a blog and transform it into a video in minutes. The software reads the blog and then decides what lines are worth adding to the video. It then uses the images in the blog and looks for other relevant images. Finally, you can then add your own tweaks and publish your story.
All of that time-saving magic is available on the free version.
But, If you’d like to get access to premium stock footage and news libraries, their premium plans can accommodate your needs. Subscriptions go from 29.99 to 199.99 and there’s a custom enterprise plan.
If you have a client who is constantly asking for videos of this kind, it’s probably worth trying and setting up an account for their brand
I tried it using Lumen 5 on this very blog. I gave myself a 10-minute limit. The app provided a good starting point from which to work with but there were some issues worth noting.
On the downside, I had to shorten many of the sentences (Obviously), the AI also failed to recognize the titles and sections in this list-format blog, in spite of having the appropriate headers in place.
I had to manually add the titles, but in Lumen 5’s favour, it was extremely easy to do. All I had to do was double-click on the text I wanted to add, and it went into the slides.
Then I quickly uploaded a few snapshots of the websites in question. I choose what I thought were more relevant and nicer images for some of the slides. This was a quick drag and drop process, and I was ready to publish in 7 minutes.
Then there was a 4 minute render time, after which, the file was downloaded to my hard drive. Though I could have shared it on social media directly. I haven’t paid for their subscription, so It carries Lumen 5’s branding at the end which wich is very thoughtful on their behalf, but also very easy to remove.
Final Thoughts
This a tool which seems more suitable for those who need to produce content at a very high pace, where quality is understandably an afterthought. That being said it’s good enough for a news outlet wanting to push loads of content on social media.
That’s it for our first look in to AI apps for video editors. There are more developments on the horizon, I’m looking forward to more Adobe Sensei implementations, testing Black Magic’s Resolve face recognition feature as well as a few voice simulation startups which will be releasing their products in open betas in the near future.
Kind Regards.
Andres.