AI tools for creators

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New season of The Mandalorian drops tomorrow. Just make sure to watch the unofficial season 2.5 (aka Book of Boba Fett) for any of it to make sense.

Now let’s get you up to speed on the latest signals in less than 12 parsecs.

Joey

TikTok announced a creator fund a while ago, but one interesting thing stands out. They want longer videos. To participate you need to make videos that are longer than 1 minute. This tracks with their longer video trend of increasing limits from 3 to 10 minutes and presumably trying to go after YouTube.

Former CTO of Adobe has launched a new company called Typeface. Its goal is to help companies use AI to create all of their content. The quick version of how it theoretically works: upload all your assets, style guides, and messaging into a central hub. Typeface’s Affinity AI learns the brand style and voice, then runs workflows and templates to spit out content, like blog posts, landing pages, social media posts, etc. One of the big pains of AI is shaping it to give you usable content. If this does that automatically, could be a big win.

Another YouTube podcast update - podcasts will be separate from YouTube Music and have their own unique features and analytics. Also, as mentioned a few signals back, uploading a New Podcast to YouTube is now being rolled out to various accounts.

Descript put out a handy list of various tools for creators that use some type of AI. Covers all the categories, like writing, editing, music, and podcasting.

Riverside put out a Future of Video Podcasting for Brands report for 2023. 85% of companies already record video for their podcasts. Primary reason - clips for sharing on TikTok. But as noted above - YouTube is going to be a huge reason to have video this year.

📑 Transcriptive: Transcribe and edit rough cuts via text right inside Adobe Premiere.

⌨️ VEGAS Pro 365: PC-only editing and VFX suite that’s extremely powerful yet easy to use

 🪧 Easyprompter: Web-based teleprompter app

Testing YouTube Thumbnails Just Got A Lot Easier

Alright, so technically this is a tool, but it deserves its own callout.

I just discovered TubeSplit. It’s a recently launched app that lets you test your thumbnails and titles en masse.

I’m always talking about how you should always be testing. The problem is it’s a huge pain. We’d manually load a thumbnail, let it run a few days, record the CTR, swap it out, wait, compare CTR, repeat.

TubeSplit can run 50 tests simultaneously.

Just feed it the alternate thumbnail and every night at midnight it swaps them out. It’ll show the CTR of each variant and give a percentage of how certain it thinks the winner is.

Even if you don’t have variations to test, it can run a test against the default screengrab YouTube pulls when you upload.

On the bottom example here, you can see a screenshot was performing better than our designed thumbnail. Clearly, something about the thumbnail wasn’t working, so we killed it.

You can also do the same thing with your video title to test variations. With the title, it’ll even come back with title suggestions and they’re actually pretty good.

Overall I’ve been extremely impressed with this and it’s something I’ve been searching for a long time. We’re now starting to load all our videos in here to test them out and learn.

Go here to try it out yourself.

Edit Your Rough Cuts in Descript

I talk about Descript a lot as a great video editing app, but we’ve also been using it as the first step in more involved, research intensive projects.

Here’s a breakdown of how our edits start in Descript and then get finished in Final Cut or Premiere.

We will be at NAB in April, the massive camera and video tech convention where all the new gear is announced.

We’ll be producing a lot of videos on the latest news and updates.

This page on our site will be the central hub, along with our YouTube channel.

I’ll also have a separate email list segment that will be a daily update of everything we covered. You have to opt-in to that one - I’m not going to send. everyone on this list daily email they didn’t ask for.

So if you want daily updates (it’s only 5 days in April), add your email to this list at the link below or just reply here and I’ll add you to the list.

Sponsor the Series

We still have slots for series sponsors. I conservatively estimate 100K views across all the videos we produce, plus this newsletter. If you want to get in front of marketers and creators, our target audience, reply to this email.