By Shiri Epstein, NoCamels -
After more than 10 years of working for some of the most famous and most powerful companies in the world, professional video editor Danielle Dafni came to the conclusion that many in-house marketing teams were in dire need of a better way to make the plethora of promotional videos required of them.
Dafni’s career in video editing began with her compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces, where she produced videos for IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Afterwards, she worked for heavy hitters such as SodaStream, Disney and Microsoft.
Producing top quality, professional looking videos is not simple; it requires years of experience and expertise, she tells NoCamels. And when a company is producing a large amount of marketing material every year, it simply cannot rely on its own people alone.
Even so, outsourcing video production is an expensive and often lengthy process, as most experienced independent editors work for several companies at the same time.
“I saw that companies have a hard time finding the perfect way to scale their video creation process because they rely on lots of external experts,” Dafni says.
Exacerbating the bottleneck, she explains, is the increasing amounts of content that companies are creating. The average firm, according to Dafni, creates around 300 individual marketing videos per year.
The increasingly versatile and popular generative AI appeared to be the solution, but the industry was slow to adopt it due to unfamiliarity, apprehension and inexperience on the part of many editors.
“People are not trustful of AI enough,” says Dafni.
This reluctance to embrace this new development led Dafni and her partners to found Peech, a cloud-based AI editing platform for videos.
Users upload their videos to the platform, the AI analyzes the footage and automatically creates requested edits and additions such as captions and music.
It can also produce short, ready-to-use clips for purposes such as social media campaigns.
The AI system carries out the entire editing process based on what it believes to be the most relevant and important aspects of a video.
It makes this decision by analyzing the videos from a visual, an audio and a content perspective, as well as using face recognition to distinguish between speakers.
Every video is automatically split into multiple sections, depending on the length of the original, and each section can be used as a standalone feature.
The platform splits the original video by analyzing the topics and themes within, such as a Q&A or instructional segment. Once this process has been completed, the algorithm then selects the best editing choices for each section.
While the process is automatic, the analysis by the algorithm can be adapted to suit the needs of each company. For example, length of the sections can be altered and even the aspect ratio of the videos changed to accommodate the specifications of various social media platforms.
At present, the AI can add graphics, text-based intro and outro, captions and animations. It can also insert background music and onscreen watermarks.
The platform can also “read” the way in which speakers in a video enunciate their speech to decipher key messages, and highlight those words and phrases in text on the screen.
And although the AI does all the editing automatically, the user still has control of the outcome and can change any aspect of the final edits to suit their demands.
The AI then learns from these changes and understands how to better manage future editing requests.
“[We want] to be the solution for the day to day, and help the people that don’t necessarily have the expertise,” explains Dafni.
Despite the versatility of the platform, Dafni says Peech currently does not dub the language spoken or work with deep fake imagery as its users do not want to see such changes to their videos.
What was implemented instead is the ability to change text and captions into other languages. To do so, each user can request a specific language added to the package that they purchase.
The company was founded in May 2020, with funding from major venture capital firms such as Cardumen Capital and Ibex Investors.
Today, the Peech platform is on the market, with clients in both the US and Europe. While freelance editors can use the service, the focus is on catering to major businesses, like the ones Dafni herself once worked for.
“When the company is bigger, there are different videos that they need to take care of – and we have the option because we have flexible technology,” she says.
Dafni calls herself a “fantasy founder,” whose product is the future of video editing. And with a team of experts constantly upgrading Peech’s technology, Dafni is certain that this is within reach.
“[We want to] be able to create things and to execute like never before,” she says. “The story is more than videos, the story is about video content.”
