You possibly read this heading and think I’m writing from your perspective, ‘will AI take your job’. No, I’m being totally selfish. Will it take MY job as a videographer. You can worry about your job.:)
Everyone’s writing an article on AI so I’ll try to keep this short and get to the point. Here’s the big ‘generative’ things that AI is doing in my world:
Generative AI. Creating videos from nothing
- Kling AI seems to doing well at the holy grail of text to video. We’ve all been waiting for Open Ai to come out with Sora, but Kling, a Chinese company, is already doing a good job of it. It will create individual scenes or footage from a text prompt.
- InVideo on the other hand, will create the whole video from a text prompt. You could ask it to ‘create a video showing the important benefits of working with a law firm’. It will write a script, and then go get stock footage to go with it, and literally compile the whole video, scenes, voice over, music and all!
- Next is Runway, which allows you to feed in an existing still picture to create video footage. This will often get results closer to what you want than text to video. This includes adding movement to people in the shot.
- With Heygen, you can take a video of yourself presenting to camera, and it will create an avatar of you. You can then for ever more, just feed it a text script, and it will make your avatar say it, with expression and hand movements.
- Last on this list there are lots of voice generator apps that will create professional sounding voice over.
Then aside from the generative apps, there’s a whole bunch that help you (and me) make videos better:
Video and audio enhancing AI
- Topaz and many other apps will upscale videos from low resolution to high resolution and generally clean it up.
- Adobe is embedding AI tools in most of its software, so for example in Photoshop you can expand a picture, or for that matter, create a new image generatively (is that a word?)
- Adobe Premiere Pro allows us to enhance your video’s audio. If you have a crappy audio track with say too much backgound noise, it will extract the person talking in the foreground and make it like they’re in a studio or somewhere in between. (I use this often)
- Lastly there are apps that will edit a video for you. Or at least the first rough cut. For example they’ll take an interview, reduce it down to key points, take out all the ums and ahhs, pauses, or interviewer questions.
No doubt there’s lots more, but my point is, will they take my job?
Will I be out of a Job?
I don’t want to be nieve and say “oh but there will be more jobs overall and AI will just do the mundane stuff, just like the industrial or information revolutions prior”. No. I think it will nibble away at the edges. For example I have had a client ask me to feed her video into Heygen to create a new talking head video. As it happens it didn’t work, but the day will come soon when it does. And it may not be perfect, but it may be good enough for some things, like internal staff training videos. This is a stark example of the impact. A client can create a video themselves instead of paying me a day’s labour.
Having said that, a videographer’s landscape is changing in so many other ways, AI is just one. For example, the rise of influencers making user generated content (UGC). Mobile phones creating great video so anyone can do it. Cheaper production cameras and gear generally. Dare I say even the move from film to digital. I wouldn’t be a videographer if I had to develop film.
A growing market at the same time
On the plus side video is now ubiquitous thanks to broadband internet, there’s lots of channels to get it in front of eyeballs, and businesses recognise the benefits and competitive necessity of using video. If they want to do it well, it still helps to use someone who thinks through the strategy and how to make it work. Someone able to film real people, locations and events and edit to make them look and sound great, and who’ll save you the time of figuring it all out. That’s me by the way. Give me a call if I can help you.
What do you think? How is AI impacting your job?
(By Keith Rhodes. I did not use chat GPT at any stage in writing this post :))
