Picture this — you’re a video editor and you get an email from a colleague saying they have a new assistant editor to recommend for you to check out.
At first you’re a bit annoyed, of course you could always use an assistant, but you don’t have the budget or the bandwidth to take in some young kid under your wing to help you out. It’d be more effort and funds than it’d be worth.
But when you click on the email invite you meet Eddy, an AI assistant video editor who is designed to help make your editing life easier. And, after five minutes of talking with Eddy (yes, talking with him) you quickly realize that this Eddy guy isn’t so bad—and can actually help you save time and effort editing your project.
Meet Eddy — An AI Assistant Editor
So, from a first look it certainly appears that Eddy is intended to be a personalized AI video editing assistant who can help editors make sense of their interview footage—and then get rough cuts done in seconds. You know, things like getting a summary, finding soundbites, organizing them by topics. Eddy AI is meant to represent a whole new way to look at your video editing workloads.
Having tried this new AI assistant out I can say that Eddy does feature both personality and a surprising amount of sophistication. With your direction, Eddy can create some pretty amazing rough cuts of your longer form videos.
And for editors that work with clients, Eddy can be used to develop a quick rough cut that you can turnaround in blazing-fast speeds. Client doesn’t like the cut? Add their notes to Eddy to get to the perfect rough cut faster. You can then even ask Eddy for additional outputs, such as cutdowns for social media.
Active Editing: Uncomfortable At First, Then Intuitive All at Once
The most unique aspect to Eddy is the conversational interface. When I first uploaded some footage the AI was able to understand the full context of it and was ready to take on its assistant editing tasks.
For one sample in particular, Eddy was able to handle a (quite challenging I’d say) back-and-forth interview about a new camera. I asked Eddy to “find key topics,” and he did. From there I queued him to “Identify the important soundbites talking about the new camera release,” and he did that too.
He was also able to take prompts like “take these soundbites and create a coherent 3-minute edit,” along with more nuanced commands like “can you add in a strong hook that grabs a viewer’s attention,” and Eddy was able to deliver the requests in edited clips each time.
It was definitely a struggle at first. I am not used to ‘verbalizing’ my intentions, so at first I was entering prompts like I do in Google Search—stiff and a staccato of words.
But the unlock for me was realizing that Eddy can iterate on edits. The first result is only just the beginning; continue to prompt him with subjective requests. And the first result is not the only result: you can ask for numerous other storylines and then compare which one you like best.
I was pretty mind blown when I realized Eddy is active video editing. Where NLEs are passive—they can only perform the tasks through the editor’s clicks. Eddy is a layer of abstraction higher and into the realm of helping you think and be more creative. He helps you experiment, understands what you want and helps you get there quicker.
Built for Pros: Communication and Exporting
Ultimately, Eddy offers some of the better AI performance for communication out there with a surprisingly complex understanding of the craft of video editing and the many nuances that go into cutting down longform footage into tight, usable clips.
For example, if you ask Eddy to explain the reasoning behind its cuts, he’ll provide you with examples and context to show you its reasoning, as well as go through your ideas with you in a full conversation.
It is obvious Eddy was built for video professionals. My video had non-zero start timecode and Eddy exported the edit as an XML for DaVinci Resolve that seamlessly relinked to the source footage. Eddy also offers options to export to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, or as an MP4.
If you’d like to meet Eddy and see if he might be the secret sauce to speeding up your editing workflows, check out Eddy AI here.
Author: Jourdan Aldredge
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
