Following up on my previous post about exploring AI in the video editing workflow, I decided to put a specific tool to the test: Eddie AI.
The promise of Eddie AI is enticing—it claims to take your raw footage, understand the context, and provide a rough cut so you don’t have to spend hours scrubbing through timelines. Since I have last year’s family vacation footage sitting on my drive, I thought this would be the perfect „stress test“ for the platform.
Unfortunately, the reality didn’t quite live up to the marketing.
The First Attempt: The Full Load
I started by uploading a significant chunk of my vacation footage—about half of what I had, which totaled just under two hours. I knew this was a heavy lift for any cloud-based processor, but I wanted to see if the AI could handle a complex narrative.
I let it run. And I waited. After four hours of „processing“ with no result and no progress bar movement, I realized something was wrong. Whether it was a server-side timeout or the sheer volume of data, the „magic“ wasn’t happening.
The Second Attempt: Trimming the Fat
Thinking I might have overwhelmed the system, I decided to be more conservative. I cut the raw footage down to a much leaner 40 minutes—the footage from the roadtrip to Sardinia. I imported it and left it to run overnight, assuming that eight hours would be more than enough time for the AI to find its way through 40 minutes of video.
When I woke up the next morning? Still nothing. No rough cut, no notification, just an empty workspace.
Back to the Basics: Final Cut Pro
As much as I wanted to embrace the future of automated editing, I’ve hit a wall. When the „time-saving“ tool ends up costing you a full day of troubleshooting and waiting, it’s no longer a tool; it’s a hurdle.
I’m officially heading back to my tried-and-true workflow in Final Cut Pro. There is something to be said for the tactile nature of manual editing—knowing exactly where every frame is and having full control over the pacing. While I’ll be doing the heavy lifting myself, at least I know the software won’t leave me hanging overnight.
Are there alternatives?
While my experience with Eddie AI was a bit of a „fail,“ the space is growing rapidly. If you are looking for AI assistance, there are other players in the game:
- Descript: Excellent for „text-based“ editing if your footage has a lot of dialogue.
- Gling.ai: Specifically designed for YouTubers to cut out silences and bad takes automatically.
- Adobe Premiere Pro: Their built-in „Text-Based Editing“ is becoming quite robust for creating rough cuts from transcripts.
- Magisto or GoPro Quik: Better suited for short, music-driven montages rather than long-form storytelling.
A Note on Privacy
One thing this experiment made me realize is the looming question of privacy. When we use tools like Eddie AI, we are uploading intimate family moments—our children, our homes, and our private conversations—to third-party servers.
Before you try these tools, it is worth asking:
- Data Retention: How long do they keep your raw footage?
- Training: Is your private family video being used to train their AI models?
- Security: How secure is the cloud storage where your memories live?
For many, the convenience of AI is worth the trade-off, but for personal family archives, the „offline“ nature of Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve feels a lot safer.