AI has been on the rise this year, and one of the industries it is impacting the most is the video editing industry. Several AI tools have came out over the past year or so that can really help video editors speed up their workflow and finish projects faster. In this post I’m going to be covering some of the AI tools I use in my workflow as a video editor and how you can use them to your advantage.
Runway
One of the most popular AI video editing and visual effects programs out there is Runway. There are a lot of AI Magic Tools inside Runway that can make what would take hours to do inside Premiere Pro and After Effects in just a matter of a few seconds.
One of my favorite features as a video editor in Runway is their remove background feature. What makes this feature unique is that it uses AI and machine learning technology to identify the subject in your scene and remove what is behind them. The AI is fed information on what a tree looks like, what a sky looks like, what buildings look like, and so on. And it uses this processed imagery to identify it in your own footage and remove it.
If you were to do this manually in After Effects, it would take forever…
Now there are a lot of use cases for this feature. You can use it to remove the background completely. Or you can replace the background with a different background. And you can even do creative effects such as placing text behind you. If you are a Premiere Pro user like I am, I’ll often use Runway in my workflow. So when I need to remove the background, I’ll use Runway and then I may bring it into Premiere Pro to add in my graphics. An example of how you can do this is linked in the video below.
There are a lot of other AI Magic Tools as well. I also like their inpainting feature. This allows you to remove unwanted objects from your scene. Another feature I like is motion tracking. There are several features you can explore on Runway.
Now you may be wondering, can’t you just do this in After Effects? You can, but there is an extra benefit for using Runway. Runway is completely cloud based. So when you do an intensive effect such as inpainting inside Adobe After Effects, you are stressing out your computer more. Where as if you use Runway, it will be done faster and it won’t bog down your computer.
If you’d like to see all these features in action, be sure to check out my video below where I walk through each one of these.
Runway is probably one of my favorite AI video editing / visual effects programs. But now let’s take a look at some already built-in effects and tools already inside Premiere Pro.
Adobe Sensei
Adobe has their own AI and machine learning program called, Adobe Sensei. And there are a lot of built-in effects and tools inside Premiere Pro that utilize it. One of my favorite tools is called Remix. Remix allows you to remix a song inside Premiere Pro to be a specific length.
This is helpful because most video editing projects are a fixed length. For example, you may be working on a 30 second commercial. And the song that you use may be 3 minutes long. As video editors, it can be quite difficult for us to edit the song to be exactly 30 seconds long, especially if we don’t have a strong music background. But the Remix tool allows us to make that song fit the 30 second video length.
This tool is located under the Rate Stretch tool if you click and long hold on the tool menu button. If you’d like to see this tool in action, be sure to check out my video below where I go over how to use it in depth.
Another really cool feature inside Premiere Pro is the color matching button inside Lumetri Color. This allows you to copy a color grade from one clip to another. So if there is a movie that you want to copy the grade of, this can be very helpful. It’s not always going to be 100% accurate, but it provides a solid baseline for you to tweak from there.
Another application for this feature is to color match between different cameras. If you shoot with different brands of cameras on a multi-cam video shoot or maybe your camera settings were different, you can use this feature to match them. This feature is located under the Color Wheels & Match section of Lumetri Color. I’ll link one of my videos below so that you can see how to use this feature.
Probably one of the most powerful AI features in Premiere Pro is the ability to have AI transcribe your speech to text. This can be very helpful for creating subtitles or closed captions. If you work on documentaries or interview type videos, you can use this feature to read through different answers and responses to determine the best take.
Adobe also just released a new version of Premiere Pro where they added text-based editing. This allows you to edit your Premiere Pro timeline as if you were editing a Word document. To see how this works, be sure to check out my video below.
One underestimated benefit for text-based editing is that if you have a slower computer, you can edit your videos faster my making your edits in the Text panel rather than scrubbing the timeline.
Now personally for me, I don’t use this feature as much as others. I do use it to transcribe my sequence and to create captions, but I don’t use it for text-based editing. I’m naturally a slow reader, and it is quicker for me to scrub the timeline. I also like listening to the cadence of the takes as well which you can’t do my just reading a script. So it really depends on your own preference and editing style.
So those are some of the top AI tools I use as a video editor. Which ones do you use and are your favorites? Leave your comments down below! Otherwise, I hope this post was helpful and thank you so much for reading!