TL;DR
- Post-production consultant Jeff Greenberg reviews more than a dozen of the AI tools available to plug into your pipeline and speed up your work.
- Automation is not always good, he says, but it’s the main benefit of all AI tools and so shouldn’t be ignored.
- Want to learn more? Join for the AI Creative Summit at NAB Show New York
AI tools are here and it’s pointless for us to pretend they don’t exist, says post-production consultant and educator Jeff Greenberg. Yes, there’s some anxiety about the jobs AI may take away but to Greenberg’s mind what AI actually takes away “is a lot of what we don’t want to do to begin with.”
In this video tutorial from NAB Amplify’s Video Learning Lab, Greenberg gives a tour of some of the multitudes of software available to automate aspects of post-production. These are either standalone products, free or paid, or part of much larger and industry-standard packages from Adobe, Blackmagic Design (Resolve) and Apple (Final Cut).
He starts off by demoing Spleeter, an open-source tool developed by music streaming platform Deezer.
“It allows you to break down a completed song or piece of audio into stems for further investigation,” he says. “You can use Spleeter to separate audio based on who is singing, or to break down a song based on what instrument is playing. Spleeter can also help you make certain instruments louder or cut them from the song altogether.” In the video Greenberg shows you how to use Spleeter to quickly modify sections of music.
He also discusses AI tools including Final Cut video tags, Rough Cut, Wobble, auto media converter, Runway, Kognate.com and Color Lab AI. He also covers Dynascore from Wonder Ink, Neubert, Isotope, crumplepop, and Audio Design Desk, which can variously assist in tagging, shaky footage hiding, background removal, color grading, and audio editing.
For Greenberg, the biggest plus about AI tools is that they take away the drudgery. “I want to do the fun stuff where I get to bring art to the imagery.”
Some tools will reframe and reformat video in seconds. When you are typically being asked for at least two or three different deliverables the idea of smart conform has to be a bonus, he says.
He notes that the market for AI products are “constantly evolving” as the next set of tools comes out and that some will produce better results than others.
Such tools are making their way into everyday video creation, if not yet at the highest end of postproduction, then certainly for corporate presentations and videography. You may choose to use one or many on one project, or none at all, but they are all designed to jumpstart processes that will otherwise simply suck up time.
