Our Storyline Episode 1: Why We Are Building An AI Video Editor

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Hi, my name is Shamir. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Storylines.

We're starting this new series called Our Storyline, where I take you into the journey of building this AI video tech startup for video editors, but also to highlight some of the challenges in post-production workflows and really try to get to the challenge of how can we all tell our story better, faster.

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Why Did We Create Storylines?

I'm really, really passionate about video storytelling. It is the most powerful, most evocative medium we have. And I'm like so frustrated that it is so difficult, so hard to get our stories out. My last company I started was called Simon Says. We were bringing speech recognition into video editing workflows. I started my career oftentimes in parts of the Middle East. I was recording interviews in a foreign language. I need to get that transcribed, then translated back to the post team to start working on it. I saw an opportunity with AI, with the inflection of speech recognition that we had more accuracy in using artificial intelligence to transcribe interviews, Simon says really gave me a lens into how speech recognition I could enhance post-production workflows.

And just over a year ago, I, like many other people, saw the power of ChatGPT and I started to wonder what if we could bring much broader AI to video editing workflows that can organize your video footage, that could log it, that could even start creating rough cuts for you?

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Where Do We Start With Building An AI Video Editor?

In my time in video editing, I've seen that video editors really hate two aspects one, searching through hours of interviews and long takes to find the perfect soundbites in the footage. And number two, digging out one minute highlights from long form videos to be used for social media, which is becoming more the norm every day. I really see these as like the mise en place of video editing. It's a slow, monotonous process of organizing the ingredients before you can even get to cooking.

The AI tools I see today feel to me like they're trying to replace the video editor, and I think the key difference for what we are trying to do with storylines is we believe in the craft of storytelling, and there's a whole bunch of tedious, mundane aspects to that. And it's like that aspect that we want to remove, to lift and liberate off your shoulders so that you can focus more on the storytelling, the real art and craft of bringing a story to life.

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What Does Storylines Offer Today?

That's where we've begun with storylines, where you can do two things with it. One, you can upload your long form footage and get amazing rough cuts of short social media clips. And number two, you can upload your interview footage and guide the AI to pick selected soundbites along a theme or a topic. We want to give every video editor AI superpowers so they can do their best, most creative work. We want to be the company that brings video editing into the next generation, and this means dramatically speeding up the workflow for video editors while keeping you in control of the creative process.

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