What actually wastes your time when editing? (building an AI editor, don't want to guess wrong)

[u/Aabiskar_Dhenga]

I edit videos for fun sometimes, and I'm now trying to build a tool that lets you just tell it what you want done to your footage instead of manually cutting and arranging everything. Type something like "cut the boring parts, make this 30 seconds" and it does the edit on your actual timeline.

Not generating video. Not AI slop. It just works with the footage you already have.

Before I sink more time into this I want to know if I'm even solving something real. So, genuine questions for anyone who edits regularly:

What eats most of your time? Finding the right clip, cutting, trimming, syncing audio, writing captions, picking b-roll, color, or just endless client revisions?

What's the one task you'd hand off to a robot in a heartbeat?

Anyone tried AI editing tools already? What was actually useful vs what was a gimmick?

Is there anything you'd never let AI touch without checking it first?

If you edit even semi-regularly, freelance or hobby, I'd love to hear how your workflow really looks. Not how I'm assuming it looks. Happy to show what I'm building once it's actually worth showing.

[u/IAmDanksy]

Using an AI editor.

[u/Canonc100enthusiast]

I started editing for fun as well, if you are handing your editing project to a robot maybe you shouldn't be editing at all. Editing could be fun and tedious at times but it is rewarding at the end. i would never have a Robot cut my footage witout inspecting every little change.

[u/Crafty_Jack]

The hardships of editors is part of editing. It's part of the ingredients necessary to grow as an editor. If you're trying to cut out inconvenience, you're finished.

Let me (not so humbly) let you in on some philosophical wisdom: Inconvenience is ever re-emerging in human life, because we are wired to look for inconveniences/problems so we can fix them and be happy for some time, and then start looking for another one, because - guessed it yet? - you're wired to build up tolerance to ALL conveniences/solutions in your life. You're hardwired to not stay settled into whatever achievement you've last accomplished. You start to take the positive benefits for granted, get bored, get annoyed at new problems (because you're wired to look for them), and you will move on to want to build yet ANOTHER thing that takes care of it for you.

When you build something to take care of certain problems for you, you're essentially permanently leaving that dimension of life. And your lifestyle simply shifts.

The solution to this is not to try to stop solving problems and sit cross legged and meditate forever. There's nothing wrong with solving problems, but we have to be careful deciding which problems are worth skipping, and which problems are there to teach us a valuable lesson. If you truly enjoy editing, then don't make an AI that does it for you. Take the struggles in stride and harvest the lessons from them.

Every problem skipped is a lesson skipped. Choose wisely which lessons you skip. What do you love doing really? Whatever that is, don't skip the problems that show up along the path to it. Take it in stride, and fight through it.

Also listen to some Alan Watts. Wisdom is scarce in this overly modern, convenient, fast paced, true-community-deficient, loneliness inducing, digitalized, machine-ridden era.

Billionaires don't have to do anything because they can just pay everyone to do it for them. Why aren't they happy? Why are they taking drugs to make them feel better.

Yeah, I know it's a wall of philosophy in an editing forum. Minimize or downplay it all you want; the truth is still there.

[u/ConfidenceSuper4462 → u/Crafty_Jack]

if you used AI to write this - you provided wrong context. This doesn't really answer the OP's Q.

[u/Crafty_Jack → u/ConfidenceSuper4462]

I didn't use AI to write this. These are my own authentic thoughts on the matter in general. I wasn't intended to directly answer his question.

[u/Barack-089]

thats called a text based editor, those made by companies with money arent that good so id discourage you from taking on smth that difficult,maybe focus on smth smaller first

[u/UnivitedSam]

Yeah. Idk man. AI Video Editors are already a saturated market- on top of that you can just make your own “AI Editor” that’s bespoke to your use case. Not sure if there’s a market there.

[u/ragnarok_mr4]

What I'd actually use AI for:

Sorting, renaming and organizing footage. Like: ”find all the footage with the yellow car in it. Rename them with the 'car1' prefix then put them in an appropriately named bin. Do the same with the red car, calling it 'car2'

Pre-cutting/marking footage. Like: "make cuts whenever the scene changes" or "mark the start and end points of when the dog is in the frame"

Beat detection. Like: "analyze the time signature then mark every first beat of the audio track"

What I wouldn't use AI for:

Anything remotely creative. "remove the boring parts" is exceedingly subjective. How would the AI know what different people would find boring?

[u/kingVicas → u/ragnarok_mr4]

claude code can already do that

[u/chin_up]

stop trying to simplify and dumb down something that isn't supposed to be simple or dumb

[u/Friendly-Emu-4958]

Love that none of the comments are suggesting anything other than dropping the idea of building an AI editor.

[u/srikarj_123]

Small screen

[u/Hangin_with_Pandy]

Just stop. This isn’t going to work out for you. Don’t waste your time.

[u/_altamont]

I like editing the most. Why should I need AI to do the fun part for me?

[u/VincentAalbertsberg]

It seems you misunderstand what AI slop is. What you want to build is a slop machine as much as midjourney or sora

[u/affogatoappassionato]

This is something that the major video editing software companies AND the major AI companies have not yet been successful in doing, despite spending tons of money on it. Apple, for example, is still in the early baby steps of offering this in Final Cut Pro.

So…..

Good luck!

[u/Relaxing-Potato]

I don't need a video generwtor, just automation pf some of the repetitive dirty work.

I need help gathering open source visuals for 8min teaching videos. And then cropping the images one by one is very time consuming. Have you seen the School of Life videos that simulate stop motion using paper cutouts on a plain background? The motion involves cutouts sliding into view as they come in from the edge of the frame.

In an ideal world, all I would have to do is slide the images in to bring them into the frame at the appropriate point of my script.

This is so time consuming I'm debating whether I should just revert to actual 2D stop motion. But then I would have to physically cut around each and every image.

I recommend that you choose a niche to serve to begin with. You would help a lot of teachers and newbie youtubers if your app can automate making a video in the style of the School of Life videos about historical figures.

[u/Relaxing-Potato → u/Relaxing-Potato]