- The Multidisciplined
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- 🤖 Powerful videos in minutes with AI
The TLDR
Main Project: This week, we’re spotlighting our favorite new AI-powered video editor, Pictory. Pictory can generate videos from text and create short shareable videos from longer ones, all using AI to pull out the most important points and edit out filler words.
Musing of the Week: The MTA (NYC subway authority) has been conducting surveillance at 7 undisclosed stations to crack down on fare evasion, without guaranteeing that fare evaders' identities won't be sent to the police. What lies under the backlash? Do we fear the tech, or do we fear the beholder?
Us discussing pickleball merch - closed captioning provided by Pictory :)
🎞 You can’t escape online video
In the always-evolving world of digital content, video continues to grab increasing market share from other media, such as written content and photos. Since 2018, weekly watch hours have risen by 62%, largely driven by user-generated and short-form videos. On Youtube alone, the world watches 5 billion videos per day. Viewers want to share great content that resonates with them, and people are 52% more likely to share video content than any other form.
We've been exploring video creation for marketing and education purposes, and think that every business could easily do the same with the tools we use.
Check out our tech stack and video workflow:
🎥 For Recording: OBS
Since we collaborate synchronously over Google Meets, we needed a way to record our faces and our on-screen work. We like OBS - it's free, open-source, and offers a range of features such as screen recording, audio recording, and webcam overlay. While the user interface can be a bit complex initially, with some patience and exploration, it's possible to learn how to use the core features effectively without much trouble.
Key OBS Features:
Screen recording
Audio recording (mic and onscreen)
Webcam picture-in-picture overlay
Multiscreen recording
Screen streaming
🎬 For Editing: Pictory
After recording, we edit our videos using Pictory ($19/month). Since we are still upskilling our video editing, Pictory's automated features have been very helpful. It's easy to learn if you're familiar with drag-and-drop tools like Canva.
Pictory excels in automating tedious tasks such as subtitling and removing pauses or filler words. Cutting these out has shortened our videos by up to 30%, and it really helps with viewer engagement and retention. Additionally, Pictory can convert articles or webinars into videos, offering an efficient way to repurpose existing content.
Key Pictory Features:
Text-to-video generation
Video-to-shorter video
Auto-subtitling
Auto-cutting of filler words and pauses
🎨 For Clean-Up: Adobe Premiere
Original color (left) vs Color Matched (right)
Pictory helps get us to 90% with video editing, and sometimes you need more specific tools to get the last 10% right. We love using Adobe Premiere (an industry staple) to fine-tune things like color balance. One of our favorite AI-driven tools within Adobe is the Lumetri Color Matching, which allows you to automatically adjust the colors in your working video clip to match with the colors from another clip. This allows you to create continuity between clips or even match the aesthetic of your favorite films. For the image above, we used a clip from Mad Max to amp the color balance of a simple clip.
🧠 Musing of the Week
4 days ago, news broke that the MTA has been surveilling 7 undisclosed subway systems using AWAAIT’s video analytics AI since May 2023 in an effort to stop fare evasion. It plans to expand to 24 more stations by the end of the year, and this discovery has sparked significant backlash from New Yorkers for a variety of reasons - privacy concerns, equity gaps, imminent fare hikes, and fear of data misuse.
This story does remind us that a tool (e.g., video analytics AI) can be inherently neutral but the impact depends on who utilizes it and how. Sports arenas use similar video analytics software to improve security, public safety, and venue operations, but fans trust that the arena authority’s primary motive is to offer a safe and memorable fan experience. It’s clear that a root cause of backlash against the MTA is really mistrust in the institution’s motives, judgment, and priorities.
At this moment, AI is being applied so quickly and unilaterally that a lot of the consequences may not be realized until too late. To navigate these challenges, fostering transparency and engaging in open dialogue are crucial to gaining public trust and steering AI technology toward responsible use.
🙌 If you’re hyped about the generative AI industry specifically, here are some of the coolest roles we’ve seen this week:
🔨 Check out these other AI tools we’ve been playing with this week (Google Chrome extension edition):
Youtube Summary - Summarizes videos and extracts highlights quickly
MyMind - Your own personal search engine, free of ads and clutter
Liner - AI copilot to supercharge your web browsing and research
That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!
Lorel & Reily