MultiMate
An AI powered video editing plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro
The AI Craze Has Arrived
The AI craze is very real and its momentum is only building. Ever since I read Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" back when in my early 20s, I was positive this moment would eventually come - it was simply a matter of when? Well, apparently the moment has come. It's all happening! For better or for worse AI is here and it's only getting more powerful.
I'm very bullish on AI and strongly believe it will reshape the world faster than anything we've ever seen before. Many jobs will be lost. Many jobs will be gained. Businesses that fail to adopt it will go out of business while newcomers will leverage AI to soar to new heights. Over the next few years AI is going to automate more than most think is even possible. I think this moment in history will be a bigger deal than the industrial revolution, many times over.
Building an AI Business
Okay great! How does one participate in the upside of this great revolution? How do we build businesses that profit from AI? How do we ensure that we build isn't immediately made irrelevant by a competitor or an even better AI?
My goal with this project was to solve a problem with software automation that was previously unsolvable without AI. It couldn't be something too obvious that would quickly get gobbled up by the big corporations. It couldn't something be too ambitious. I should be able to bootstrap a MVP in under 6 months. And it had to be a problem that I understood deeply.
Earlier in my career I was a video editor. While a lot of the work is very creative and gratifying, a lot of it was monotonous drudgery. One great example of this kind of work in the video editing world is multi-cam editing. This is when you have a shoot (typically an interview of some sort) with multiple cameras and multiple speakers. The job of the video editor is to simply cut between the different camera feeds available such that the most relevant shot is always shown.
Why not use my skills in software to automate my old job as a video editor?
AI has gotten very good at processing audio (and video is right behind it!). AI can transcribe entire conversations, remove background noise, isolate different speakers, instruments and sounds, it can even 'sweeten' audio recorded from a low quality mic such that it sounds like it was recorded in a professional studio. These tools are all becoming invaluable to a video editor.
But what does using these tools for actual video editing work look like today? Most of these tools live on their own website. Video editors predominately work in video editing software. To use these tools a video editor must do the following:
- Export the audio from their editing software.
- Go the the website with the relevant AI technology.
- Upload their audio file to the website.
- Download the result from the website.
- Import that file back into their video editing software.
Yeah, not the best user experience, but people are doing it anyway because these tools are too valuable to ignore.
As a product specialist, I care deeply about the user experience. These tools should be integrated into the video editing software itself and should be tailored to the professional workflows of video editors. Using AI to enhance your work should be simple and intuitive - not feel like jumping through hoops.
Enter MultiMate
With MultiMate, I decided to start integrating these AI tools into the professional video editing workflow by building an extension for Adobe Premiere Pro, the most popular video editing software in the world. This way video editors have access to all the best, cutting edge AI tools without ever having to leave their editing software or their flow state.
This also allows me to automate much more than just a few AI tricks. I can use all that data to actually automate actions and workflows right in Premiere Pro. The possibilities are endless, but for starters I'm working with audio, transcription, and multi-cam edits.
MultiMate can literally cut an entire multi-cam edit for you in seconds. It doesn't matter how many cameras, or how many speakers. You can even record it all on a single audio track and it'll work!
As more and more AI comes out, I'll be adding it to the MultiMate toolbox. The pace is certainly not slowing down. I'm very excited for what comes next. This is only the beginning.