ChatGPT and Midjourney may be the frontrunners in the AI-powered chatbot and image creation revolution, but giants like Adobe won’t be far behind — the company behind Photoshop has previewed something that could completely democratize video editing new artificial intelligence tools.
In March, we saw the arrival of Adobe Firefly, the company’s new line of generative AI tools. Now Adobe has previewed exactly how Firefly will power its video, audio, animation, and motion graphics applications, which could include starter-friendly apps like Adobe Premiere Rush or Spark Video.
While these features are just a preview and not an upcoming update, it’s clear just how powerful these text-to-image tools will become. We’ve seen text-based editing come in handy in Premiere Pro, but these new tools look like they’ll be especially novice-friendly—in fact, in most cases, they could completely eliminate the need to learn complex video editing tools.
For example, one example Adobe showed was text-to-color enhancements for videos. Enter a time of day, season, or color scheme for an existing video and it will apply the necessary edits. Even vague cues like “make this scene feel warm and inviting” work in Firefly-powered programs.
Not that you will be limited to automatic color grading. Almost every aspect of video creation, from music, sound effects, text, logos, and b-roll, can be edited in a new AI-powered text box like we’ve seen with ChatGPT.
In the company’s “Meet with Adobe Firefly Video” demo, the “bright, adventurous, upbeat music” cue (just enter your terms and hit “Generate”) added a royalty-free background to the video Music, and the option to add ocean foam sound effects to match the scene.
The time-saving potential of these new AI tools is also evident in the “Generate Captions” demo, which shows a transcript being analyzed and split into perfectly timed captions for a short-form social video. Likewise, the “Find Behind the Scenes” button scans the auto-generated script and places the appropriate transitions into the video timeline.
Perhaps the most exciting idea, though, is the “Generate Storyboard” button, which again scans the written script (albeit with clearer faux signposts like “Wide Shot” and “Close-up Shot”) and sketches it out for you ( or your videographer) to follow through the full sequence of shots.
Apparently, these editing concepts are in their early stages, and there’s no timeline for their rollout in the Adobe program. Given that we too are in the AI hype bubble, we won’t pass judgment until we see them appear in Adobe apps and can try them out in the real world.
But the potential for video creation is huge, especially for people making short films for commercials or social media — and Adobe is the best place to make it possible, as its models are clearly open-licensed or The training copyright for public domain content has expired.
Analysis: The Power of Prompts
Like the best AI art generators, Adobe’s upcoming Firefly video tool isn’t a substitute for real creativity or a skilled video creator. But they could open up basic video editing skills to a whole new audience, and take the usability of apps like Adobe Premiere Rush to a whole new level.
Tools such as text-to-color enhancements and auto-generated sideshows are also great time savers – if these tools also work properly, the entire process of video editing including music, sound effects and subtitles can be drastically shortened as they did in the demo .
Like ChatGPT, the key skill required may be learning which hints to use to achieve the edit or effect you want. One of Firefly’s main strengths appears to be its natural language processing capabilities and ability to understand ambiguous statements such as “make this scene feel warm and inviting.” But you still need to know how to describe the look you want – the more specific you are, the better the end result.
Still, the biggest change is that we’re moving from a world of video editing apps filled with cryptic symbols and jargon to ones with simple text boxes with understandably vague prompts — and that’s only going to make video editing apps more widely available. The field is open to the audience.
