RunwayML Foreshadows the Future of Content Creation
By Adam Pease
RunwayML, a browser-based video editing platform, has just recently announced a new feature it calls ‘text to color grade,’ which allows users to edit the color schemes of videos by simply typing out the style of color they’d like to see.
With features like these, Runway leads the race in developing applications for creators that incorporate AI at their foundation, rather than just as a feature layer.
In this first edition of Aragon’s blog series for content AI, we consider RunwayML as an early example of an AI-first content creation platform, and consider what it might reveal about the future of the content AI market.
What Is Runway Bringing to the Table?
Runway represents an important player in the emerging market for applications that leverage what Aragon has called generative content. Generative content refers to content that has been produced either fully or partially by AI systems rather than human creators.
Runway provides a cloud-based browser-accessible user interface for editing video in a way that will be familiar to users of applications like Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
The key difference between Runway and these legacy platforms though, is that Runway is designed from the ground-up as a cloud workspace that leverages emerging AI capabilities to streamline and automate the workflow for video content.
Runway’s platform features a variety of different tools that users can leverage to generate content, speed up the video pipeline, or automate traditionally manual editing tasks.
Its tools for masking and rotoscoping, for example, make use of computer vision to rapidly segment scenes in ways that could take human creators painstaking hours of work, making it possible to pick out a figure or other visual element and erase it from the clip in seconds.
The addition of its new color grading tool shows that Runway is not slowing down when it comes to delivering its promise of an AI-accelerated video creation suite. The challenge will be for Runway to draw together its different AI features in a unified package that positions it to compete with the quality and adoption of legacy apps like Premiere.
The Future of AI-First Content Creation Apps
While Runway is still in its early days of adoption and innovation, Aragon feels that its business model foreshadows developments we will soon see across the whole landscape of content creation applications.
We expect that the content creation applications of tomorrow will be leaner and more nimble, leveraging the cloud and AI to centralize assets and automate their assembly.
Microsoft has recently entered the fray with its announcement of the new AI-powered Microsoft Designer, which takes advantage of the Azure-OpenAI partnership to deliver state of the art capabilities, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generation model.
Whether the content in question is video, image, or audio, we expect that creators will soon expect and demand these kinds of features from their content creation platforms.
We expect that across content creation applications, providers will shift towards offering capabilities that are grounded in a virtual assistant-style user interface that enables users to make requests through natural language.
If providers are successful at delivering flexible and responsive natural language programming interfaces, it cannot be understated how much this transformation of workflow would impact the way that content creators get work done.
By eliminating the difficulty of learning proprietary toolsets, or of manually completing tasks like video masking, AI could drastically reduce the time it takes to produce professional video content.
Bottom Line
We expect legacy video editing software providers like Adobe and Apple to respond to the challenge by continuing to incorporate more AI functionality into their products.
The outstanding question is whether this will be enough to win the race.
Innovators like Runway face an uphill battle challenging the widespread adoption of legacy providers, but they are also advancing an entirely new model of application design that is a threat to legacy providers and could disrupt the industry.
Microsoft, which has decided to push an entirely new AI-first business application as its strategy, is clearly sensitive to these dynamics.