The 6 Best AI Text-Based Editing Tools to Speed Up Video Editing and Maximize Your Creative Potential

There are many analogies one could use for the AI revolution we’re currently in. However, as is the case with any major tech advancement, it’s hard for anyone to truly see or predict what an industry will look like after the revolution.

That said, if you’re a content creator, filmmaker, or video professional currently trying to stay ahead of the tech curve, your best bet is to strap in, stay informed, and wait to see where things go.

With that in mind, one area in which AI has already changed the game quite a bit is video editing. Specifically, text-based video editing powered by AI tools and features has been a revelation for those who work in certain video production styles, such as documentary, corporate video, and other narrative forms.

Let’s examine text-based video editing and its operation and recommend the best AI text-based editing tools currently available to video pros.

Premiere Pro

While many might think of AI as a recent innovation in the past year, Adobe has quietly had many AI-powered tools and features in several of its popular design and video apps. Under the name Adobe Firefly, the company’s AI technology has indeed come a long way over the past several years, though.

One area in which Adobe has added AI-powered tools to its flagship NLE video editing software Premiere Pro has been text-based editing. A great tool for working with transcriptions and captions, this text-based editor in Premiere Pro is built-in and easy to use, ideally for those looking to work on long-form or documentary-style projects.

You can learn more about Adobe’s text-based editing here.

2. DaVinci Resolve

Introduced by Blackmagic Design in the beta version of DaVinci Resolve 18.5, text-based editing is now a standard feature in DaVinci Resolve Studio. Resolve’s “Speech to Text” feature utilizes automatically generated AI video transcription. It can also identify silent sections within clips and fill those as well.

To use the AI Speech to Text feature in DaVinci Resolve, a user must select a clip in the media bin and click the “Transcribe Audio” button. The AI-powered software will then automatically produce a transcript, which editors can edit as they see fit.

Silent sections will be marked with ellipses, and if you highlight text in the transcript, you’ll be able to see the same section of the clip in the timeline. This will allow editors to quickly navigate and make changes to their projects.

You can read more about working with this text-based editing feature in DaVinci Resolve here.

3. Vimeo

While several AI text-based editing tools, like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, might be full-scale NLE software, did you know that you can also edit your videos directly on social video websites like Vimeo? Vimeo launched its text-based video editor with its most recent AI-powered updates.

If your video contains audio in spoken English, you can use the Vimeo text-based editing feature with the Trimmer tool to edit your video. Vimeo users can easily remove filler words such as “ums” and “uhs,” word gaps with no sound, and any other selection of individual words or longer sections of footage containing speech.

There are some other more advanced editing features and tools that work with Vimeo's text-based editing feature, which you can read about in this full guide here.

4. Descript

If you’re more interested in using text-based editing for podcasts rather than video, then Descript is one of the best tools for using AI-powered editing features for your podcasts. However, Descript is a full-featured, end-to-end video editor that can work for both audio and video.

It’s found a home with podcasters, though, simply because it works so easily with audio and text. Stylized to feel like you’re editing documents like you would with Word or Google Docs, Descript’s text-based editing feature makes it easy to go through long recordings and find the best sections to edit, splice, trim, or delete.

You can also arrange parts of your video as you would a slide deck, making Descript a great option for those who know little about traditional digital editing platforms and would like their text-based editing to feel more organic and easy.

Read more about the text-based editing options in Descript.

5. Lumberjack System

Marketed as the “ultimate solution for text-based video editing for productions,” Lumberjack System aims to offer a text-based editing feature for those productions that rely heavily on transcripts. Lumberjack System is optimized for radio cuts from transcripts for Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro and is designed for users looking to write stories from multiple transcripts simultaneously.

Lumberjack System offers a “Builder” feature that works as a hybrid word processor and video editor combined. It’s a faster transcript-based workflow than what you’ll find in Premiere Pro and other NLEs and offers helpful features. For example, text and video are always linked so that users can go from scanning text to observing nuance instantly.

The Soundstripe AI Song Editor

Now that we’ve covered some of the text-based editing features, let’s look at some other helpful AI-powered tools that can help streamline your video and audio projects. One truly groundbreaking AI innovation of which we’re quite proud is our new Soundstripe AI Song Editor.

As many content creators can tell you, finding the right music to add to your content has always been tricky. Not only do you want to find the exact right track, but it’s also very likely that the song won’t be the same length as your content.

With our new AI Song Editing feature, you can utilize artificial intelligence to manipulate a Soundstripe track in seconds with the quality of a professional audio engineer. The AI Song Editing feature uses groundbreaking AI to analyze a song and instantly generate shorter, self-contained snippets, each of which sounds natural or can be combined with other clips directly in-app to produce a custom edit that sounds as flawless as the original version.

With AI Song Editing, you can engage with a track at a new level of detail and control, cut or extend it to the perfect length, loop a specific section, or completely rearrange it in no time while maintaining the highest musical integrity.

If you’d like to learn more, here’s a link to check out our Soundstripe AI Song Editor.

More AI editing resources

As AI continues to be the most talked about topic in the content world, staying current on the latest new tools, features, and innovations in the space is important. If you’d like to continue reading about how AI can be used to streamline your content workflows, check out some of these additional articles from the Soundstripe blog: