What I've Learned in the Past Year Spent Building an AI Video Editor

[burningion]

https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/a-year-of-showing-up/

[35mm]

As someone who has worked as a video editor, the most helpful AI tool would be prompt based editing.

For example “find all the interview sections where people are talking about x and make a sequence”.

OpusClip claims to have this but it’s behind a waitlist.

[yunohn → 35mm]

Not a personal jab, but I am astounded how every day, HN is full of discussion around how articles, newsletters, podcasts, and videos need to be aggregated and summarized for actual consumption. Repeat ad infinitum in both directions.

In my experience, I’ve always listened to live discussions or read long form blog posts, specifically for the story and obscure points being made. Summaries never capture that and always miss nuances.

[pjc50 → yunohn]

Not sure about articles, but people keep recommending multi-hour-long podcasts and videos far beyond the ability of any employed person to keep up with what they might want, so a summary is a useful tool to extract the salient points and possibly consider if something meets the threshold of being better than all the other hour-long things I might want to spend my free hour on.

It sometimes feels like media has bifurcated into hyper-dense (let me explain a whole field of law in a 30 second tiktok) versus hyper-fluffy (documentary with 30 minutes of material spread out into six episodes, with a recap before and after each commercial break), depending on whether the target audience has a job or not.

[mjburgess → yunohn]

It has a lot to do with the kinds of articles that appear on HN and across the internet. And also, that spending time on something requires being interested in it, and so, there's a larger audience for summaries.

I think, in general, most people have areas of interest to them where it would not occur to them to summarise what they're having fun engaging with.

[42lux]

Thanks, I hate it. The examples we see in your later screenshots are the exact garbage that gobble up tiktok, reels and shorts feeds.

[mips_avatar]

I agree that building AI on top of the video editor is probably a mistake. Maybe the format of the representation of the video can be something better than a series of matrices of pixel values.

[arjunaaqa → mips_avatar]

Absolutely true ! Re-imagined AI first products will kill AI patched up legacy products.

Always.

[SCUSKU]

Love the author sharing their winding journey as well as the tools and things they learned along the way. You can tell the author did grow a lot through this process, and through the year. Great stuff, thanks for sharing these great tips :D

[lukaqq]

Impressive blog! I am building a professional web video editor - https://chillin.online and trying to embed various AI workflows into it. Your article has given me a lot of inspiration. Thank you!

[sfmike]

what do you think of this versus the ai that is hiring actors that are then reused as models in the videos via script