Video editing is one of those skills where it’s relatively easy to pick up the basics, but really, really hard to master the art. If you don’t know your compression from your crop factor, or your J-cuts from your jump cuts, fear not! We’re not promising we can turn you into a YouTuber overnight, but what we can do is let you in on some of the secrets of using AI for video editing.
You may not have video editing capabilities on your L&D team (or even in the business), but that doesn’t mean you’re shut out of creating polished videos to engage your employees! AI has changed everything about the video editing process, and it’s now accessible to absolutely everybody in your business, from the accounting team to your CEO.
Below, we’re going to explore some of the top ways in which learning professionals are using AI for video editing today, including adding captions to elearning intros, creating punchy microlearning assets and refining promotional materials for your internal marketing and comms.
5 ways to use AI for video editing
If you use a lot of video in your L&D assets (or want to start this year), we've come up with five ways you can make the most of AI to take your videos to the next level, even with zero video editing skills!
Stitching together multiple existing videos
Recording the raw footage is, surprisingly, the easy part. Even if you didn’t get your framing, lighting or background 100% right, AI allows you to correct everything with the click of a button.
What can be tricky, though, is putting your clips together in a slick and seamless way. You may want to splice together your SME talking about a concept with an animation explaining what they mean, and then add in a clip of a TED Talk from a renowned industry expert. When you use AI for video editing, you can simply upload all your clips, then let the AI tool figure it out for you, with simple drag-and-drop reordering to create a narrative that makes sense.
Making video content more accessible
One of the ways you can use AI for video editing is making your content more accessible. Instead of painstakingly adding subtitles to each and every scene, you can create AI-generated captions that will automatically track with the speaker. AI can also translate these captions for you, which is useful for diverse global audiences, and create text transcripts for those who prefer written content.
If you identify issues such as a lack of colour contrast, which can be problematic for people with colour blindness, you can also use AI to increase the contrast for you, while still keeping the video looking natural. For almost zero effort on your part, you can make all your videos much more accessible and inclusive, which will in turn help your people feel valued.
Reusing and recycling video assets
One long video can be sliced and diced into multiple shorter assets, complementing your learning assets with microlearning, just-in-time performance support and media content for the L&D team’s internal comms. You could even do this with legacy videos to breathe new life into courses that need more engagement, or to help promote existing elearning content.
It’s a trick used all the time in content marketing, where one long ebook will be broken down and remixed into blog posts, social media posts, infographics, testimonials, website copy and more. It helps you squeeze more value out of your video assets, and means you don’t have to record separate videos for every little thing you do – you can simply chop and change between clips to create a whole asset library.
Refreshing out-of-date video content
It’s typical that 15 minutes after you publish your new elearning course, there’s a major change in the topic, meaning you have to revisit and update all the assets. Rewording a block of text and replacing an image in an elearning course isn’t too hard, but updating a video could take hours or days.
With AI, you can simply upload your existing video and make tweaks to the visuals, generate a new AI voiceover and snip out any outdated information, without needing to go back to your video agency. This makes it much quicker and easier to manage these edits as and when they arise, rather than waiting for an expert to do it for you.
Empowering SMEs to make their own edits
Some SMEs are happy to get hands on with their content assets. They may want to write their own scripts, provide their own images and create their own quizzes – and video content is no different. The vast majority of your SMEs won’t be experts in video editing, but AI tools give them the power to shoot their own raw footage, make edits until they’re happy with the video and send it to you, ready to publish on the LMS.
This is especially useful when you’re dealing with highly specialised content topics, or high-stakes compliance training. Instead of having to engage in frustrating back-and-forth between the L&D team, the video editor and the SME, using AI for video editing means you can empower the SME to make sure everything is accurate, streamlining the video editing process and maintaining the high quality of your learning content.
Top 5 AI for video editing tools
Ready to get started? Here are 5 of the best AI for video editing tools we've found!
Sora
From the team behind ChatGPT comes Sora, a brand-new text-to-video AI tool for video generation. While it’s not available in the UK just yet, it’s likely to rapidly become one of the most-used AI video tools.
By typing in a simple text prompt (such as ‘a busy train filled with stressed commuters’ or ‘historical footage of an English food factory in the 1960s’), Sora will generate a video for you in seconds that can be used in your learning content. This could be handy for video intros, B-roll or descriptive footage when you don’t have the time, budget or expertise to shoot or animate the video yourself.
Discover Sora
OpusClip
Very often, capturing the raw video footage is the easy bit. Anyone can hit record on a video call to collect the original footage – it’s the next part that poses a bigger challenge. Tools like OpusClip are a great example of using AI for video editing, as they split long videos into short, shareable clips in seconds.
Simply drop an existing video into OpusClip, and as if by magic, it’ll find the highlights for you, snip them into clips, add AI-generated captions and stitch in relevant B-roll, giving you a curated series of short videos to use throughout your learning programme. It’s ideal for tying together your learning and comms, as you can create perfect promo materials from your full elearning course videos with zero hassle.
Discover OpusClip
Captions
Despite what the name might suggest, the Captions AI video editing tool does so much more than just creating AI-generated captions. Instead, you upload your raw video, tell it what you want it to do and it makes it happen before your eyes. Whether that’s adding B-roll, changing backgrounds or transitions, a tap of Captions’ AI Edit button replaces hours of painstaking manual video editing.
Alongside the video editor, Captions also supports video translation, AI avatar generation and AI video clip generation, helping you create short, engaging clips from your original content. Speaker detection helps ensure the right person is on the screen at the right time, making it especially useful for sharing conversations between SMEs or your business leaders.
Discover Captions
Capsule
Capsule has a lofty ambition – to turn every single employee into a video creator. It helps people create videos 10x faster, even if you have absolutely zero video editing experience. Capsule is especially valuable if you have an overstretched in-house design team, who may not have time to make endless rounds of edits on every video they create for you.
Notably, you can turn your team’s After Effects files into responsive templates, meaning you can work smarter, not harder. You can also collaborate with your team within Capsule to ensure video editing gets done (and signed off) faster.
Discover Capsule
Filmora
Filmora is a real powerhouse of AI for video editing. AI drives the entire video editing process, giving you perfectly polished, consistent videos every time. Whether it’s creating short clips, reordering scenes, enhancing the video or managing multiple camera angles, you can do it all in Filmora.
In mere moments, you can take a raw, unedited video into a series of slick clips to be used across your LMS, elearning courses, microlearning playlists and internal comms, as well as adding special effects, filters, transitions, royalty-free music and more. Nobody needs to know it was all done with AI!
Discover Filmora