The landscape of image and video production has undergone a seismic shift with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). There are now a multitude of tools that can enhance, automate, and create content. This transformation offers both opportunities and challenges.
We already use AI in our workflows. It helps with our editing, speeds up our workflow, enables us to generate extra content and give us the ability to make more content form the things we have created.
Many of the professional images and video we create have an AI enhancers. The skill is in not making it look like AI was involved.
The Capabilities of AI in Image and Video Production
AI tools for image and video production offer a range of features that cater to different aspects of the creative process:
- Content Creation
- AI Image Generators: Tools like DALL-E and MidJourney can create high-quality images from textual descriptions, offering unique visuals for marketing campaigns.
- Video: Platforms such as Runway ML and Synthesia enable the creation of videos with AI-generated characters or voiceovers.
- Image Upscaling: Software like Topaz Gigapixel AI enhances image resolution without loss of quality, critical for print campaigns or large displays.
- Automation and Efficiency
- Batch Editing: AI-powered platforms such as Aftershoot and Imagen streamline tasks such image selection, colour correction, cropping, and resizing.
- Smart Tagging: Metadata generation tools use AI to tag images and videos with relevant keywords, improving searchability and content management.
- Editing
- AI is now built in to most image editing applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop enabling super quick and very effective corrections and enhancements to be made to images.
- Video editing software often now includes AI tools to enhance, extend and even expand videos
Benefits of AI in Commercial Settings
The adoption of AI in image and video production provides photographers, videographers and businesses with several tangible benefits:
- Cost Efficiency: AI reduces the need for teams or expensive hardware by automating tasks and streamlining workflows.
- Speed: Projects that previously a long time can now be completed much more quickly, enabling faster turnaround.
- Scalability: AI makes it easier to produce lots of content for multiple projects and to reuse content in new ways.
- Creative Possibilities: Ai opens up a whole new world of what you can do with existing content. You can create images from videos, make movies and manipulate images in whole new ways.
Challenges and Considerations
While the benefits are compelling, integrating AI into image and video production is not without challenges:
- Quality Control: AI-generated content can often look fake and has things that just look wrong with it.
- Ethical Concerns: The use of AI-generated images or videos raises questions about originality, intellectual property, and authenticity.
- Skill Gaps: Teams may require upskilling to effectively use AI tools, adding to initial adoption costs.
- Bias in Algorithms: AI systems can inadvertently perpetuate biases present in training data, leading to problematic content.
- Costs: Using AI tools has financial costs. Each new iteration you make costs money and yo have to pay for a subscription and the fee varies depending on the subscription.
- Time: Creating images and video using AI tolls still involves putting in the time to get the required output.
Best Practices for Commercial Use
To maximize the potential of AI in image and video production, consider the following:
- Define Clear Objectives: Start with a clear understanding of what you aim to achieve with AI, be it marketing content, image re-use or other purposes.
- Combine AI with Human Expertise: Use AI as a tool to enhance human creativity, not replace it. Maintain human input and oversight to get the most out of it. Often AI works best to enhance human made content.
- Stay Ethical: Establish guidelines for the ethical use of AI, addressing concerns around authenticity and intellectual property.
The Future of AI in Commercial Content Production
AI’s role in image and video production will grow, driven by advancements in generative AI. Businesses that embrace these technologies thoughtfully will find themselves able to produce more content more quickly.
By integrating AI into their workflows, photographers and videographers can achieve a blend of efficiency, scalability, and creativity. However, the best results come when blending human creativity and input with AI’s capabilities.
