Can't find the link right now but I think Microsoft is working on auto-cut software that automatically detects interesting moments in a video and stitches them together?
The TomTom Bandit is an attempt to do that. The editing app is pretty decent, and it uses motion sensors and GPS on the camera to auto-detect interesting highlights in the video. (disclaimer: I do work there, but not on that team)
there are a few orgs working on this using AI/Machine learning on the b2b side for news/journalism orgs, no offerings for general users yet but it's on the horizon for sure.
I don't know what you call that, "dropping a steaming binary turd on your friends"? I dunno, but "editing" it is not.
I've got literal hours of video of some dirt road in the Alaska tundra. No one wants to watch that, I've got to whittle it down to the highlight and parts that folks might enjoy, like the mountain goats in the middle of a blind corner or the moose running across the road. And that is time-intensive; literal hours for fifteen minutes of something I'd share with people. Not just finding the interesting parts, but captions and titles, and some kind of soundtrack, it all adds up to non-trivial amounts of time. One could just hit the "share" button, but no one's going to watch more than 30 seconds of it.
One also quickly learns that from the camera's POV a lot of stuff looks alike. Our recent trip down the Icefields Highway in British Columbia looks like any of a hundred mountain roads when viewed through the lens of a camera. Makes me kind of wonder why I bother.
When you've had to deal with the hours-of-video problem, you learn to be much more selective for when to start recording, and for how long to record. But even with that, and end even when you've learned the tricks of your editing software, and when you have given up the inner perfectionist, in my experience each minute of the final (amateur!) production still takes 10-100x more time to put together.
Automated editing solutions would help, but compared to editing by hand, I'd say they would compare same way as Instagram filters compare to a photographer/retoucher working in Lightroom/Photoshop.
Maybe not iMovie, but I've been having great fun with the 'Memories' feature in iOS 10. I used it to make a 4min video of our recent family holiday in 30min on the plane.
- Imported photos from our waterproof camera (compact-style, not GoPro. Cheaper than GoPro!) via the Apple Camera Connector.
- Used mainly photos from the iPhone, but because I have Live Photos turned on, it was the 6-sec video that got put into the final clip instead of just the still.
I agree with your premise; the hard part is definitely finding the interesting bits. Actually putting them together is easy after that.
There's some good stuff happening with "exciting moment detection" based on other sensors; like peak heart-rate and speed if you record those on Garmin.
That's not editing. iMovie is only easy if you don't actually edit your videos--arrange, slice, add music and text, etc. Video editing is slow and difficult.
I was thinking about the Snapchat glasses, which I initially regarded as stupid. But when I considered the intimidation factor associated with video editing, it dawned on me that Snapchat's 10 second time constraint effectively forces users to shoot video that is super easy for the masses to edit, arrange, share and aggregate, and within a universally defined set of constraints. So I think snapchat glasses could be huge success. They have a simple, low tech solution for the 'editing video for presentation is hard' problem, which isn't an immediately obvious problem, but it's critical.
I agree. And the snapchat glasses bring the fundamentals of editing down to the level of fingerpainting, which effectively democratizes it. No matter how skilled an editor you are, if you're publishing to Snap, you're on the same playing field as any 14 year old doing the same thing.
A little bit of well-design AI would be huge in this space. Imagine you import your raw footage and a rough cut with typical shot selections for your content and pacing is already arranged for you...just tweak from there.
