Nearly 80% of Surveyed ACE Editors Are Using AI, New Data Finds: ‘You Adapt or Die’

There are many whispers throughout Hollywood about how many professionals are secretly using AI tools. But a cohort of film editors are ready to go public.

In a survey of 120 members of the 1,200-body American Cinema Editors conducted by Avid, the tech company behind editing software stalwarts like Media Composer and Pro Tools, 77.5% of film editors are using AI to some extent in the post-production process. Many of the use cases relate to helping with transcription (60%), audio cleanup (55%) and searching for specific shots within the hundreds of hours of footage available to editors on a project (39.2%). But others cases involve a lot of the more underrepresented areas of where editors work, including generating specific shots to help producers identify what footage they need to capture or tagging the details of specific shots.

“Nobody grows up saying ‘I dream of sinking dailies one day,’” said Matt Feury, Avid’s vice president of artist relations who helped lead the survey. Editors, he added, were “trying to minimize the amount of manual stuff that they have to do that is just part of the process: the media management, the metadata management, things like that” instead of using it for creative decisions.

Feury said Avid launched the survey to determine whether some anecdotes the company had heard about editors’ resistance to the technology were accurate. Instead, he said, the survey indicated just the opposite.

“Just by nature, editors are always exploring new avenues, new technologies,” he said. “They’re not really afraid to try things. So, despite what we were hearing anecdotally, like, there’s a lot of resistance to it, a lot of editors already were using it.”

The data reflects Hollywood’s wider engagement with AI throughout the filmmaking process, from using tools produced by companies like Ben Affleck’s InterPositive to some dabbling with fully AI-animated projects.

Part of the reasoning for such adoption may be sheer necessity. Emmy-nominated editor Molly Shock told Variety that, even as some of her editing peers weren’t eager to learn more tools, many of them were still hungry to stay on top of the technology’s advancements to try and keep themselves more hireable, particularly as Hollywood jobs have become more scarce.

“We do recognize it’s not going away,” she said. “You adapt or die. So that’s a pretty big incentive.”

In some cases, she and her peers found it helpful. On a recent season of “MasterChef,” where she and her colleagues had access to AI tools for the first time, producers needed a shot of a contestant looking at a clock for a time check. In past seasons, when it could take several hours to scour “thousands and thousands of hours” of footage to find a shot, editors managed to locate multiple examples within seconds. Some days, she said, half a day’s work has been reduced to 15 minutes.

“It’s smart enough that it recognizes who the contestants are, and you can just say, you know, ‘John does time check,’” she said, adding: “It just gives me more time to give a better, more polished product. I wouldn’t say I’m more efficient. It just gives me more time to do the really fun part of editing, the real creative stuff.”

Still, Shock and Feury recognized some of the concerns editors have expressed about the impact AI can have on editing jobs, especially as the technology continues to advance so rapidly, and don’t believe editors want AI to replace their work.

Creative intent is at top of mind for most respondents, with nearly 100% of daily or weekly users saying AI should only enhance the creative vision of their projects. In Avid’s data, only 7.5% of respondents said they wanted AI to help with assembling shots or rough cuts of projects. Ethical, copyright and security concerns were nearly 50% of the barrier to using AI, indicating the ever-present concerns surrounding AI’s place in Hollywood still reign.

Shock said editors want to learn the tools, but “they just want to make sure we don’t set up a new system that just completely eradicates any kind of growth.”

“We the editors understand that this AI could be a really cool tool,” she said. “We just want to make sure we’re included in the conversation of how it’s going to be used, and we’re not just thought of as a button-pusher and, ‘OK, we can just replace this person with a program,’ because we do so much more than that. So as long as we are being able to be in the conversation, we are very appreciative.”