Artificial Intelligence (A.I) has become the buzzword of our times. People fear it, people loathe it, people look to exploit it, people question the ethics of some of its uses, but most people are keen to explore how it can benefit them.
You’ll hear no disagreement from me that it’s fairly problematic how certain A.I models train on copyrighted material; the way that anyone can generate a piece of work derived from an artstyle that a talented individual has worked a significant amount of time on is not cool.
However, there are a number of far more ethical ways you can utilise A.I tools in your workflows, and a number that are native to your favourite editing programs! Let’s dive into a few.
1. Content Aware Fill (After Effects)
This feature caused a bit of a buzz when it was added by Adobe a few years back, and can be a lifesaver when needing to remove something unwanted from your footage.
Content Aware Fill analyses the surrounding frame from a masked out area of the footage and creates an image sequence of the filled-in space. Certain situations work better than others; the less camera movement, the better, but playing around with this can save your hours of tedious work painting out unwanted objects in the frame.
Content Aware Fill can be found in the window options of After Effects.
2. Generative Fill (Photoshop)
Now, as a video editor you may be wondering how a photo editing program can be used in your workflow.
Well, Photoshop’s latest version comes with a feature called Generative Fill, an A.I tool to quite literally create any additive modification to any still image. This can enable you to create backgrounds for edits, matte paintings for VFX, and even extend the frame of a static video clip.
Utilising a little creativity with this tool can really help open up new avenues for your edits.
3. Scene Edit Detection (Premiere Pro)
This one can be super handy if you are editing clips from an existing video; say you need to find a certain shot from a previous showreel but can’t find the original video file, you can use Scene Edit Detection to automatically detect the cut points within the video, helpfully isolating that shot for you.
Premiere Pro uses A.I to detect these cut points, and handily creates and places your isolated clips into a bin in the media browser.
To access this feature, right click on the click and you’ll see the Scene Edit Detection option.
4. Roto Brush (After Effects)
Roto Brush is another useful A.I-powered feature that can be found in After Effects.If there’s one task I hate when doing any compositing or visual effects work, it’s rotoscoping. This process of manually tracing around a subject is both time consuming and mind-numbing when extrapolated over numerous frames. This is where Roto Brush comes in.
Found and triggered in the toolbar, Roto Brush allows you to click and paint over your foreground subject, and After Effects will automatically ‘guess’ where the edges of the subject are, offering you a mask around it. You can then tweak by ‘Alt-dragging’ over the background elements of the scene to refine the mask.
This simple process of toggling between selecting foreground and background using the brush is quick and easy to use and can provide you with a mask that might otherwise have taken precious minutes or hours.
After Effects can even track the selected foreground elements to offer a very usable animated mask, turning one of the most tedious of tasks into a doddle!
5. Auto-Generated Captions (Premiere Pro)
When it comes to social-media content in 2024, there are certain expectations that your audience will have. One of these is captions burnt into the video, allowing viewers to follow the dialogue without turning on the audio of their device.Did you know there is a way to automatically generate these captions right within Premiere Pro?
By opening up a Text window in your project, you are presented the options of creating a transcript from the audio of your project, or both creating a transcript as well as generating the captions layer in your timeline.
You may need to go in and tweak the odd word, but generally Premiere Pro does a great job of transcribing, and is a huge time-saver in the process!
Whilst A.I has it's critics, it is helping push a number of great features into our day-to-day editing software that is can improve our workflows greatly. These are likely to only get better and better, so give these tools a try and see for yourself how A.I can help out you and your work.
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