77.5 percent of surveyed film editors are using artificial intelligence in post-production, according to data released by Avid.
The tech company behind editing platforms like Media Composer and Pro Tools surveyed 120 members of the American Cinema Editors, representing a fraction of the 1,200-member organization. The findings show that 77.5 percent of respondents incorporate AI to some degree in their daily workflows, countering widespread industry speculation about systemic resistance to the technology.
Most editors utilize the tools for technical chores rather than creative storytelling. Transcription leads the use cases at 60 percent, followed by audio cleanup at 55 percent and searching for specific shots across hundreds of hours of footage at 39.2 percent.
Additional applications include generating reference shots for producers and tagging shot details. Matt Feury, Avid’s vice president of artist relations, helped lead the survey and said that professionals embrace the software to shed tedious administrative duties.
Nobody grows up saying ‘I dream of sinking dailies one day.’
Matt Feury, Avid’s vice president of artist relations
Editors are “trying to minimize the amount of manual stuff that they have to do that is just part of the process: the media management, the metadata management, things like that,” Feury said.
He added that Avid launched the research to test anecdotal reports of pushback from creatives. Instead, the data revealed a willingness to experiment. “Just by nature, editors are always exploring new avenues, new technologies,” Feury said.
For Emmy-nominated editor Molly Shock, adoption is driven partly by professional necessity amid scarce Hollywood employment. “We do recognize it’s not going away,” Shock said. “You adapt or die. So that’s a pretty big incentive.”
Working on a recent season of “MasterChef” provided her first professional access to such tools. When producers requested a specific shot of a contestant checking a clock, software that recognizes individual contestants allowed her to locate multiple examples within seconds.
Tasks that previously consumed hours of scouring thousands of hours of material now occasionally take 15 minutes. “It just gives me more time to give a better, more polished product,” Shock said. “I wouldn’t say I’m more efficient. It just gives me more time to do the really fun part of editing, the real creative stuff.”
Despite high adoption rates, nearly 100 percent of daily or weekly users surveyed said the technology should exclusively serve to enhance creative vision. Only 7.5 percent of respondents indicated they wanted automated assistance with assembling rough cuts or putting together initial sequences.
At the same time, ethical, copyright, and security concerns account for nearly 50 percent of the barriers preventing wider use across the industry.
Shock emphasized that editors want a voice in how studios deploy these systems moving forward. “We just want to make sure we're included in the conversation of how it's going to be used, and we're not just thought of as a button-pusher and, 'OK, we can just replace this person with a program,' because we do so much more than that,” she said.