[ Updated: May 3, 2025, with Adobe’s list of AI features in Premiere Pro. ]
“AI is our future.” “AI will enable us to work faster/better.” “AI will destroy all creative jobs.”
The hype surrounding AI presents software developers making tools for creatives with a dilemma. As Dan May, President, Blackmagic Design, Americas, said in our interview at the 2025 NAB Show: “I think the challenge there is, how do you create something that’s going to make life easier for creators without replacing creators? Like, obviously it is not Blackmagic’s goal to replace [the] creators [who] are our customers.”
Recently, Avid coined the term: “Responsible AI,” which is “a proactive and responsible approach to the use of these [AI] tools and technologies for both internal and external applications.” (Avid blog).
Adobe doesn’t use this term, but does follow this approach. Kylee Peña, Adobe’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Creative Cloud, described it as creating AI tools that are “commercially safe…, which means they’re trained only on things that we have permission to train on licensed content, public domain, things like that.”
However, “commercially safe” does not mean copyrightable. Lawsuits are still in process seeking to determine whether the derivative work of AI, or the prompts used to create an image, can be copyrighted.
This approach, making focused tools based on machine learning that enable specific tasks within an NLE, seems to be the current approach for Apple, Adobe, Avid and Blackmagic.
Results after using magnetic mask in Final Cut Pro.
AI IN APPLE FINAL CUT PRO
Last week, I contacted Apple, Adobe and Blackmagic to get a list of the AI features in the current versions of their software that are powered by AI (or, more accurately, machine learning).
Here’s the list from Apple for Final Cut Pro (v11.x):
It is important to stress that all of these Apple features calculate the AI locally on your system. This means nothing is uploaded to the cloud, Apple does not use your data to train its AI, and there is no risk that your locally-stored media or projects will be scraped for AI training by someone else.
Transcript from Kylee Peña’s interview with Larry Jordan at 2025 NAB Show.
AI IN ADOBE PREMIERE PRO
Here’s the list of features in Premiere Pro (v25.x) that are powered by AI/machine learning:
Unlike Apple, some of these features, such as Speech to Text and Caption Translation require an Internet connection because the processing is done in the cloud.
AI IN DAVINCI RESOLVE
(I’ll update this article when they send me their list.)
SUMMARY
Each of these features produces results that are hard to do manually, but, in themselves don’t replace the need for a human editor to create the finished program. As Avid writes: “The human is still in the loop.”
I’ve created tutorials for many of these features. Their speed is breath-taking, the time saved is significant and the results are stunning. Yet, in every case, there’s still plenty of work left for me to do to get my project finished.
As I learned at NAB, AI is very much front-of-mind for every developer I talked with. Unlike most generative AI systems, which seem to defiantly stomp past traditional boundaries of copyright, ownership and social impact, the developers creating products for media pros are struggling to find the right balance between creating features that improve their tools versus replacing the editor.
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