An Editor's Take on AI Rough Cut Assembly

Ed Hayes is a video editor in Australia. Nobody at Quickture asked him to make a video about us. He made one anyway, and it is three minutes well spent for anyone who cuts long-form footage for a living.

"This has saved me hours, days, even a week."

That is his line, not ours.

From 2.5 hours to 40 minutes

Ed loaded two and a half hours of wedding footage, including point of view material shot from a helicopter. Quickture returned an assembly edit just under 40 minutes. The vows were in there. The scenery was in there. The moments he would have spent a weekend hunting for were already on the timeline.

Then he gave it one more note asking for a ten minute sequence. He got back ten and a half minutes he described as absolute gold. Same material, tighter.

The part that matters more than speed

Ed makes a distinction most editors will recognize immediately. Some people build up from a rough cut. Others carve down from one. His point was that Quickture worked either way.

That is the real question behind AI video editing software. Not whether it is fast. Whether it flattens your work into someone else's idea of a cut. Ed's answer was that everything was still there, just shorter and more to the point.

Breaking the back of the edit

For every hour shot there can be three hours of editing. Compiles, transcribing, logging, rough cuts. That is the part of post-production that eats the calendar, and it is the part Ed says Quickture broke the back of. He has even started reopening projects that had been sitting on the shelf, because he can now take them start to finish in a reasonable amount of time.

His closing thought was that he would rather spend his hours perfecting a final cut than grinding through footage to get to one.

That has been the goal from the beginning.

Watch Ed's full three minute walkthrough below.

https://youtu.be/XAsbuo9cZd0

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