Every technology buyer’s journey involves watching videos. If you’re involved in budgeting and producing those videos, you’re probably looking for ways AI can help. I think you can get the most out current AI solutions by looking at cost savings and ROI, not creative output.
Who are the Most effective Users of AI for Video?
The answer is in the title “How Runway took The Late Show edits from five hours to five minutes,” an entertaining article on the Runway website. Asked how they first became aware of Runway’s video AI capabilities, one of the Late Show graphics team responded, “I found it by watching a rotoscoping competition on YouTube.”
If rotoscoping competitions are your thing, you’re exactly the kind of person garnering the maximum time and cost savings from video AIs — a dedicated creative, whose output is otherwise slowed down by tedious (and not especially creative) processes like rotoscoping. (Rotoscoping is making changes to film or video frame-by-frame.) If you’re not that kind of person, you can still benefit from AI help, but less of it.
Increasing the ROI of Technology Marketing Videos
The people working on your videos may not need to speed up rotoscoping, but there are plenty of other editing processes that AI can help them with. It’s not unfair to ask them to pass along the savings to you.
Here are a few ways AI improves video production and editing efficiency.
- AI tools can speed up excerpting clips from an existing video library to repurpose segments for multiple uses.
- AIs can generate videos in aspect ratios (square, tall, wide) preferred by different social media sites and devices.
- AI services can quickly generate human-like voiceovers from text. That can work for new videos and repurposed clips.
- AI can dub videos in different languages. You’ll need to have the translations carefully vetted, but you’ll be able to make changes easily.
AI for Creative Content Creation
Well, an AI might be able to punch up your script little. But one of the takeaways from the Late Show article cited here is the amount of upfront creative work done by writers, graphics pros, and researchers before a single frame of video is output.
AIs based on large language models aren’t visual thinkers. They can create images, but someone needs to tell them what they should look like. Which means someone needs to have thoroughly thought through a story, including how it will work visually. This is true even if you’re using existing diagrams.
An AI that promises to turn your text into video is going to do it with on-screen text, stock images, and stock video — sure signs of “marketing” to an audience that doesn’t want to be “marketed to.”
All-in-all, you should be able to count on AI to free up your creative team for more creative work, done more efficiently. You should not expect much in the way of video creativity from the AI itself.
Further reading:
This article from Zapier, written from the standpoint of a video creator, does a good job of summarizing the how generative video speeds up the editing process.
