AI and Video Production: An Editor's Exploration of OpusClip, Descript, and Cutback

Our Goal with AI Tools

To be clear, this isn’t a guide, this is just us sharing our findings with you as a company producing thousands of videos every year. We also do not have any relationship with any of the tools mentioned.

We were specifically looking for an AI tool to help us create shorter cutdowns of longer video content for social and YouTube.

We most closely tested OpusClip, Descript, and Cutback. (We looked at a few other options I won’t shame here, but didn’t deem them worthy of evaluating.)

Descript and Opus

Descript is probably the most well known and has the most fully featured web based editor. It was the best at searching the transcript, finding selects, and identifying content related to what you prompt it for. It is also, in our opinion, the best looking and most user friendly.

Opus is great for uploading a finished video and getting short form edits fast based on your prompt. It will scale and reposition video for vertical but will sometimes select b-roll shots that don’t look good vertically, and will instead add a blurred background. It has a ton of AI features, some useful, and some not. It is the only tool where you can upload a clip and it will generate “fully polished” shorter clips, sometimes over a dozen options. We found that about 20% of the clips it generated were usable, and the rest were pretty questionable

…but that’s more clips than you had before, so I guess it’s a win?

It also ranked them for “virality” but in our humble opinion that’s a bunch of hooey.

Both Descript and Opus can pull from stock image libraries to fill the gaps but the selections were pretty poor, and any brand that respects itself isn’t going to leave those decisions up to an AI.

Opus is a bit more customizable with the ability to upload your own b-roll library, set brand standards, standardize logos, and do some other tweaks to help you control branding across videos.

Both Descript and Opus can add those captions that sync with the speech and give you that nice TikTok aesthetic that we all know and accept.

A key problem with both of these is that they cannot splice together several clips to tell a story. In a typical video edit, we may be pulling a word here, a phrase there, interjecting another speaker to reinforce an idea, etc. These programs can just cut a chunk out of a speech and plop it between some titlecards.

Either way, with both of these tools, if you want any sort of creative control or polish you’re still going to need to take it into a professional editing tool.

Descript and Opus both have the ability to export the AI assembled clips as an XML timeline to finetune in your preferred editor, but Opus’s timeline export was much more complete with clips cropped, captions as a track, and multiple audio tracks. This is a nice function if you’re just looking for a way to quickly get some selects into a Premiere timeline.

So while you may save time identifying selects and creating social clips, you’re still going to need to add or adjust b-roll, find music, fine tune graphics, reframe clips, adjust lengths, find better b-roll, etc.

They both feel geared more towards pumping out social content for non-editors.

Our clients demand exacting brand standards (as they should) and these tools are not yet useful in our process, but there was one that brought the best of each of these platforms, and did so right within Premiere. That tool is Cutback.

Cutback

Cutback gives you the most control. That probably has a lot to do with it being a Premiere plugin, and our team has been using Adobe for years. Cutback behaves like an assistant editor, transcribing and summarizing the interview as "chapters.” It's able to identify different speakers and remove anyone that's not the on-camera talent, remove filler words, silence, and re-takes. It has a fairly intuitive edit-by-transcript workflow and can compile ideas from throughout the entire interview into new sequences - all natively within Premiere.

We created a sequence, transcribed the entire interview, then asked Cutback to provide short clips. We were given about nine options, selected from throughout the entire interview. B-roll/graphics/music were added from inside Premiere already. Unlike Descript and Opus, it assembled clips from multiple camera angles and portions of speech - it didn’t just slice out a portion and call it a day.

The original media is also preserved, allowing editors the flexibility to switch cameras in a multicam sequence, update color, adjust sound, or tweak like you would any other edit.

It can also work alongside other tools. For example, if you were to provide a paper edit from Descript, Cutback can cut the original media to that script right in Premiere. It can also generate Premiere captions for further control.

Final Thoughts

Descript is a great tool if you want to quickly assemble a paper edit, start editing within a transcript, or even for helping find key moments. Opus is a great tool if you want to quickly generate content with an extra level of polish, but don’t need things to be too polished.

Cutback is the best one, providing the best functions of Descript, with more customization than Opus, all natively within Premiere and working with native files.

These tools were useful to:

• Find clips
• Create rough edits
• Create captions

But they won’t replace an editor.

AI is a tool, not a team member. I soundly believe it will help creatives to do more, not replace them.

The idea that a computer program could be a useful alternative to a real human crafting a story is insulting. I fully reject it.

It can help you get to a first draft faster, which means getting to a polished draft sooner but it can’t replace a life living human.

I won’t say it won’t replace them in some places, but it won’t anywhere that values quality.