It goes as a joke between most of our colleagues that someday machines will take over and our jobs will be done by bots. We always dismiss it laughing since that stuff happens only in movies. But then again it used to be that pandemics and lockdowns were a just thing from the movies, and now if we look from the window that’s all too real.
Could it be that our work as editors is silently going to be replaced by some Artificial Intelligence? Jack Cole has been trying out a plugin for Premiere Pro that promises some interesting results and he’s going to try out if there’s something true in said claims. Will this be the beginning of the rise of the machines or a very useful tool to speed up our workflow taking care of menial and time-consuming tasks? Let’s find out.
It has been a dream for some of us to have an AI to consult when in doubt, something that could speed up all those cumbersome tasks you have to do when editing, like reviewing footage and throwing away the bad bits.
Technology has been doing so in all fields since the invention of the wheel, and we’ve seen a lot of improvements in our field as well. Just think of how many assistant editors used to acquire tapes inside editing software, getting audio and video in sync, and so on.
Now, all that it takes is a click on the timeline and you can get perfect sync for any kind of clip. It still amazes and seems like magic every time it happens.
So getting back on topic, here we have an extension made for Premiere Pro. It is called Shakefree AI and is taking upon itself the task of checking the footage and getting rid of the unusable bits.
It’s well known to anyone who has been editing in the past that this is a very slow and time-consuming process. Instead what happens here is that once all the clips intended to be processed are on the timeline, Jack summons the extension and feeds it the sequence.
And boom! Just as advertised, we can see that inside the bin there are now two sequences. One is made of all the good parts, while the other has all the discarded parts. That is done so that you can go back and revert any incorrect trimming the extension could have done.
It’s incredible how little it takes to analyze the sequences. They’re short it’s true, but still that is not a lot of time, and most of all, the really impressive thing is how accurate the ripple edits are.
When jogging through the discarded footage we can see that almost all the clips inside are useless indeed. Pans, shakes, almost all have been correctly tossed aside.
This extension needs to be kept under surveillance because it will probably turn out to be one of the next big things in video editing. Its price is steep, now there’s a discount at $50 for a year and $150 lifetime, but you could go for the 10-day trial and see if it suits your workflow.
[source: Jack Cole]
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