This article comes from WeChat public account: SF Chinese (ID: kexuejiaodian), author: SF.
Nowadays, for video editors, the ratio of repetitive work to creative work is at least fifty-fifty. Adobe's upcoming new version of Pr integrates multiple AI tools that can directly eliminate all repetitive work and bring video production back to creativity.
AI has entered our work, lives, and studies. Among them, many designers and film and television workers regard AI as an important auxiliary tool. Recently, Adobe Corporation announced that within the year, several major AI tools (including Pika, Runway, Adobe's Firefly, and OpenAI's Sora) will be integrated into their video editing software Adobe Pr.
It can be said that Pr is about to become the first editing software to integrate all the well-known video AI tools on the market, and it is jokingly called the Pr family bucket on the Internet.
Integration, although it sounds plain, is just connecting several AI tools to Pr, but it is precisely such access that may bring revolutionary changes to the video industry.
For current video AI tools, whether it is Adobe Firefly or Pika and Runway, users have to visit their respective official websites to use them, and it takes quite a lot of time in actual work to achieve combined use.
For a simple job like modifying the video screen, such as we need to change the handheld Sprite in the video material to handheld Coca-Cola. First, we have to open the official websites of Firefly, Pika, Sora, and Runway respectively, and upload the video material that needs to be modified to each tool - because it is not clear which AI tool makes the modification more in line with our needs. In the second step, we have to input the modification request in the instruction area and then copy it to each AI tool and wait for them to generate works respectively. If the work is not satisfactory, we have to modify the instruction on the corresponding platform, regenerate it, and then download the work. In the third step, we have to import the downloaded video works into the video editing software one by one to see which one best meets our requirements.
Next, it is the most troublesome: if the generated effect is not good enough, the above process has to be repeated several times. 90% of the time in video production is spent on downloading, uploading, importing, and exporting.
In the Pr family bucket, all four major video AI tools have set up interfaces. Opening Pr is equivalent to using 5 software at the same time, and how to use them in combination is completely determined by AI. Integrating all these AI tools in one video editing software can completely avoid those repeated operations. Using the Pr family bucket, we only need to let the AI tool recognize the Sprite on the editing timeline and then input the instruction, and the AI tool can replace the Sprite with Coca-Cola. In addition, the works generated by the AI tool will also directly appear on the editing timeline, and we can modify and regenerate immediately, greatly improving work efficiency.
As mentioned earlier, to a large extent, the current video production is filled with too much repetitive work, and creativity is ignored instead. Even for the film industry that has developed for more than 200 years, it may be difficult for the audience to imagine that for film editors, at least more than half of the working time is spent on repetitive work.
For example, a film editor needs to erase a certain character in a film. The current solution is that all the shots that can be cut are cut, and the parts that cannot be cut (such as when this character appears together with other characters) can be mosaicked, but the mosaic will seriously affect the beauty of the picture. There is also a solution: dig out this character from the picture and then fill it with materials that fit the nearby scene. In this way, although it seems that there is no trace of repair, it requires a team of at least a dozen people to repair day and night for at least one month.
But now, in the Pr family bucket, the functionality of Firefly has expanded to videos. Firefly is an AI tool developed by Adobe Corporation and is good at intelligently filling or deleting elements in the picture, and can recognize and calculate elements such as the tone, light and shadow, motion trajectory, and object edges of the picture.
Just circle the person to be erased, and Firefly can automatically recognize his movement and change, thereby intelligently filling the picture and completing the seamless repair with one click.
In addition, these repairs can be undone - which makes editors feel even more excited. In the current editing work, if you want to undo the repair and restore the previous picture, it is very difficult to do, because the current editing software can undo a limited number of operations. Once the repair work has reached the later stage and you want to restore it, it is equivalent to having to re-make the video. And the intelligent repair of Firefly can be undone at any time without damaging the original material.
The basis of video production is materials. In the shooting process of materials, there will inevitably be accidents, such as missing shots, bloopers, etc.
When there is no Pr family bucket, in such cases, reshooting and redoing are required, but the cost is high, and due to various reasons, the reshooting work may not be possible at all. In the demonstration video released by Adobe Corporation, AI tools such as Pika, Sora, and Runway can generate videos out of thin air according to instructions or reference pictures, and also consider shooting elements such as camera movement, zoom, and the movement of the main body in the picture. In this way, when we find that we have missed a the protagonist chases the car and runs, and the camera follows shot, we only need to input the instruction describing the chasing scene in Pr.
It can be said that remedy has become a part of creation.
In fact, if videos can be directly generated, many live-action shootings can also be cancelled. This not only saves manpower, material resources, and financial resources, shortens the production cycle, but also allows the production team to use more intelligence in creation. If we want to shoot the picture of the protagonist cycling in Antelope Canyon in the United States, the current practice is that the entire production team takes a plane to the United States and then goes to Antelope Canyon, and also needs to coordinate the shooting time, find the right camera position, and shoot multiple times to ensure that there are usable pictures. This requires a lot of investment. If the AI generates videos directly with the help of reference pictures, let alone Antelope Canyon, it can easily realize the protagonist traveling through various famous places around the world. Moreover, the videos produced in this way are much more realistic than the commonly used green screen keying.
For the video production team, the Pr family bucket allows them not to worry too much about the investment problem anymore, and video production returns to the essence of creation rather than the competition of financial resources.
The integration of AI tools has brought the video industry back to its artistic essence. For video creators, these new attempts of Adobe Pr are just the beginning: in the future, more editing software will access more powerful AI functions. The word editing may disappear, and it will be replaced by creation.