Chief Technology Officer at Lucihub | AI Consultant
August 8, 2023
I am learning quite a bit in the process of taking on my new “gig”. I’m serving as the CTO of Lucihub. A big part of my role and responsibilities will be the design and implementation of AI across the Lucihub software platform. And that has already proven to be super fun and exciting. But it’s the problem they have already solved with their newly launched platform and the industry segment they are serving that makes it really interesting. And let’s face it: for a software guy, working with creatives is just plain fun.
Background
Professional level video production is hard. It is time consuming, and it is expensive. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars with multiple people involved and weeks of time between shooting content and delivery. The reasons are many. A significant component to the barriers exists because so much manual human expertise is necessary. The automated tools that do exist are rudimentary and mostly feeble. Consequently, expert level human intervention is required: from the creation of the script, to the storyboard, to the shot list, to the voice overs, to the filming, to the editing, and everything in between.
From my own personal experience over this 30-year software journey, I know that trying to produce my own professional level videos (as an amateur) has been a challenge, well mostly a failure. I know my way around video editing software. Yet, I have been making poor quality videos for a long time. I have expertise from the Adobe suite of video editing tools down to the most simple video editors that Microsoft ships with Windows. No matter what tool I have used throughout the years, the process was always too tedious and cumbersome for the quality of output I was producing. It was never about the creation of the content. I talked to experts. I studied photography and video content creation techniques. Techniques like composition, framing, lighting, the sun, the “golden hour”, widescreen shots, quality audio, POV shots. It wasn’t about the quality of content for me. It was always about the production.
I’m not creative. I’m an engineer. But even a non-creative like me can shoot good content. The problem was always about the enormous “time-suck” and hassle of editing that content. I will never forget saying to one of my colleagues when planning for a trip, “I’m bringing a real camera.” He deadpanned while holding his iPhone in the air, “This is the real camera.” I didn’t realize it at the time. But the smartphone makers were investing in both high quality lenses and incredibly powerful camera software. I don’t believe anyone will disagree with me when I say, “The combination of 3 technology innovations: smartphone cameras, high speed cellular networks and the cloud were the innovations that launched the social media revolution”. But I never would have guessed, let alone predicted, that a preferred device for high quality video and photo content was going to be the smartphone.
The Bold Promise
Imagine a world where your team or customer or just regular people like me use their smartphones as a creative tool for capturing and sharing your brand's story in a product placement video. Or in a training video or in a real estate video or even in a wedding video. Or in an outdoors adventure video, or…
Here is what I have learned: The days of expensive long production periods of professional quality video production are over.
Lucihub’s current product suite completely automates the professional video production process. It’s seamless integration between cloud and mobile, optimized for cloud and mobile software architecture they aptly call “film to final”.
And get this: you shoot the content with your smartphone. After the software automation, there is a team of professional video editors covering the world’s time zones that do the final production of the professional quality video. Professionally editing at a fraction of the cost; delivering at a fraction of the time because of software automation. The current software suite can facilitate a professional event video produced before the event is even over!
Are you familiar with the NCAA march madness “One Shining Moment” video? It’s basically a summary video of the entire basketball tournament including the highlights of the final game. It’s played by CBS after the set of commercials after the final game ends. It is truly amazing how CBS pulls it off. But, in reality hundreds of professionals are involved over six weeks at astronomical costs. Lucihub is basically a similar concept… just faster to production at a fraction of the cost.
AI can help
Well, that’s one of my roles at LuciHub: The design and implementation of AI tools for the Lucihub suite of software that help people produce professional quality videos even faster at a fraction of the cost. Again, like I have said so many times on stage: Artificial Intelligence done properly facilitates tools that help humans. AI is tools for humans; it does not replace humans. If you think it through, you can imagine what I get to do…and how fun it’s going to be.
My goal is a natural language interface:
• “Take all this content and produce a four-minute video for me to edit.”
• “At least 65% of the content has to include conference speakers.
• “Of that 65% make sure that 1/3rd of it is the keynote speakers"
• “Include content with the product announcement.”
• “20% of the content should be from the conference party.”
• “Minimize content of the food and the meals to less than 3%. But, make sure to include the content that highlights the cocktail party.”
• “Use all the content of the attendees interacting with the speakers.”
• "Use at least one video of the tradeshow floor that includes people."
• “Now align all the duplicate content on the timeline so I can pick the best shot.”
You get the idea. Of course, the prerequisites to pulling this off will most likely include some sophisticated prompt engineering with a custom large learning model (LLM) and some video analysis AI tools.
Does that sound fun or what?!