Canva's new suite of 'magic' AI tools

One quarter down for 2023 - time flies. Tomorrow is manatee appreciation day. Just don’t call them a sea cow (or try to ride them).

Less than 3 weeks for NAB - let’s jump into the signals!

Joey

🪄 Last week we talked about Adobe’s new AI tools (called Firefly). Now Canva just announced a bunch of new AI tools on top of their already existing Text to Image and Magic Write. Now there’s Magic Eraser, Magic Design, Magic Presentations, and Magic Edit. They should rebrand to Houdini.

🛰️ New video platform to keep on your radar: Zigazoo. They already have a TikTok like video app for kids - now they’re launching one for Gen Z. Main differences from TT: no text comments, only video replies. It also has trending prompts to encourage video creation.

🥞 Apple acquired WaveOne, a startup that uses AI to help compress video. This could be a play for new, more efficient video codecs (Apple created industry standard ProRes) or to make streaming for Apple TV+ more efficient.

💰 Later, the social media scheduling app, released a Creator Rates Report, gathered from a survey of over 500 influencers. Instagram is still the top platform for paid posts. The format of the content is the biggest factor in determining pricing (photo vs video). Average rate of a TikTok video is $700.

🪦 Amazon is shutting down DPReview, one of the longest-running camera review sites. Add this to the list of Why did Amazon own this anyways? (like IMDb). Sad to see an outlet that does in-depth camera testing and reviews go. Uncertain if they’ll even keep the 25 years of archives up (which is kind of crazy since they literally own AWS).

But if you want some new camera roundup videos…

🧵 Postwise: One of the best Twitter post and thread writing tools I’ve seen

📗 Subtxt: AI powered narrative story writing

🧰 re:tune: Build no-code apps with GPT-3

Keeping the Video Editing Process Moving

So we run our entire workflow inside ClickUp.

We treat tasks as objects, so a single task = a video, and the subtasks are all the individual todos that need to get done.

Ideally, we run through the list and each item gets ticked off as it’s completed.

But where things get jammed up is when it comes to reviewing edits and leaving notes.

Things go from a linear process to a potential loop. It’s also where things can get messy or fall through the cracks.

We’ve been using two editing workflows to keep things moving, and I’ll break them down here.

Option 1 - Task for Every Step

On our more established channels where the video format is pretty set, and with an experienced editor, we pretty much know the video will take two rounds of edits.

So with this template we have a task for every single step - edit the first version, review the first version, edit the second version, etc. This workflow assumes there are at least two people involved - the person making the video (producer) and the person editing it (editor).

All these tasks are linked as dependencies to each other, so when one is marked complete it triggers an automation to advance to the next task.

The tags on these tasks are also tied to automations - let me know if you want me to break that down in a future Signal.

This workflow is really good for mapping out timelines - we have a task for a first cut and second cut that we can space out in timeline or Gantt view.

It’s good when things go smoothly and predictably…but that’s not always the case. When we need a V3 or V4 we have to go back and reset all the tasks and change the names.

It can be a pain. The next option is to accept this and just keep a small, tidy loop.

Option 2 - Small Loop

Next option is much simpler.

Just 3 tasks: Edit, QC, Review.

You could even narrow this down to 2: Edit & Review.

QC is optional and something we’re experimenting with. We’re building out editing and graphics guidelines with clear examples of what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

If a producer is managing a dozen videos in the pipeline, it’s a waste of time for them to review a cut that has basic graphics issues that don’t meet the standards.

So we have an assistant review the first pass and flag any issues that are a simple pass/fail.

Then it gets sent to the producer to give higher-level story notes.

So this loop expects that we’re just going to keep re-opening each task until the video is locked.

We lose track of what version of the video is being edited (we track it in a custom field) and it makes it harder to map out an editing timeline, but we don’t have to keep changing task names or deal with 6+ different tasks.

Both of these have their pros and cons. We haven’t found a perfect system (if it even exists).

If you’ve got your own editing task setup that’s different I’d love to hear about it.

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 a 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 segment at the link below or just reply here and I’ll add you to the list.

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How else I can help you:

• Check out our YouTube channel with lots of free tutorials (and let me know what else you’d like covered)

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