New tools for making videos remotely

Not a great week for Vice or BuzzFeed News. My quick takeaway - people want more specific media that speaks to them and their interests (The Information, Morning Brew, Substack/Beehiiv). Also, don’t treat media like tech and take a bunch of money without being profitable.

Now for a tiny media experience, here are this edition’s signals.

Joey

🎟️ Google rolled out some new ad products for YouTube shorts (video reach and appear next to trending shorts).

🪜 This Moz article breaks down how AI is changing the process of making blog posts. There’s a lot you can adapt and pull from this to apply to video creation.

👨‍🏫 A brief history of some of how the language models we’re using have evolved (specifically Facebook’s LLaMA model).

🎭 Two sides of the deepfake coin - deception vs productivity boost. Synthesia, the human AI generator, is close to the center of this debate.

👍 Key moments from videos have been showing up in Google search results for a while, but now people are seeing the key moments grouped into Pros and Cons for product review videos.

For the next few weeks, we’ll round up the best tools by category that we saw at NAB.

In this edition let’s talk about Remote Collaboration tools.

Alteon

Alteon is one of the newer tools to be released. It’s entirely cloud-based and has flexible storage options depending on your needs, from active storage to less expensive archival storage.

The idea is you’d keep all your media on the cloud. It has tools to tag and organize footage, plus integration with Premiere and Final Cut to download the media you need for active projects.

Some notable features I like about Alteon:

• Integration with IBM Aspera, which is built for quickly uploading large files and folder structures.

• Send upload links to request footage

• Sleek and simple interface and powerful review tools

• Simple pricing

Iconik

We’ve been using Iconik for a while. It’s rolled a lot of tools into one for us - managing and sharing all our media files, generating proxies, internal and external video review tools, transcribing our footage, and more.

It’s storage agnostic, so you can bring your own cloud storage or local storage.

It can get a little technical, and there are a lot more technical features it’s capable of that I haven’t tapped into but if you’re a coder or have someone technical on your team it’s very flexible to build custom workflows.

PostLab

We didn’t record a video with PostLab at NAB, but they’re a great tool that I thought was still worth mentioning. The video above explains what they do (manage project files across a team).

They also have an integration with LucidLink, which made file sharing seamless.

LucidLink

LucidLink is a bit different - it’s a virtual hard drive that mounts on your computer like any other drive but the files are streamed from the cloud. You basically have an unlimited-size hard drive that can be shared with multiple people anywhere.

Unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, the files are streamed in real-time, so you don’t need to cache or download them in the background, which is what every other file-sharing platform does.

How Waystar Could’ve Used AI

🚨 Succession spoilers

In the latest episode of Succession, Greg thumbscrews an editor to make Logan say something different from what he actually said (basically to Frankenbite his audio into something new).

As an editor, we’ve all been there. We’ve run through transcripts of audio to find a single word we can splice in to clarify or better express what someone is saying.

But watching this scene in a world with AI, the first thought that came to mind was, “You don’t need to find existing audio anymore…you can just generate it.”

So here are a few tools Greg and Mr. Snippy-Snip could’ve used to change what Logan says:

• Descript: Descript’s Overdub feature is trained on your voice and can generate new audio from whatever you type out (you do need to give it a voice consent to do this).

• Play.ht has voice cloning

• Lovo also has this

• Still in beta but ElevanLabs is said to have some of the most realistic AI voice tech ever.

Easy peasy, no more Frankeniting audio.

Also, Greg’s reaction after this finely edited video airs is how we all react (internally) to a video we know had a lot of problems and took a lot of work but is so seamless no one pays any attention to the editing.

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)

• Get our YouTube & Video course, which has had over 4000 students

• If you have a specific project in mind and would like to potentially work together, just hit reply