Gling transformed my business yesterday

It’s hard to describe how big a deal this is for YouTubers

I’ve been talking a lot about the ‘tech slump’ my niche is currently experiencing. It’s not unusual at this time of the year, but it does feel particularly desolate at the moment.

This is a mixture of the big trend-driving brands hunkering down and developing products rather than launching them and the rise of publicly-accessible tools that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which is hogging all of the headlines and the attention.

The proliferation of AI is happening faster than any other tech trend I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. It is frighteningly quick. And, yesterday, I was introduced to an AI-powered tool which changed my entire business in seconds.

Yesterday, I shot the a-roll for Monday’s Solo Club video. It was a horrible shoot. There were constant retakes, I lost my way on numerous occasions, and I considered giving up more than once. This resulted in over 40 minutes of largely useless footage which I’d need to cut down to around eight minutes of engaging YouTube content.

The edit is where the story is told. It’s where the magic happens. But it’s also one of the most time-consuming elements of the creative process. The a-roll edit is the best example of this; getting rid of those errors, and repetitive takes, and finding the stuff that tells the story takes a long time.

Only, it used to take a long time. You see, there’s a new tool doing the rounds and it uses AI to do this kind of editing for you. It’s called Gling, it barely seems to be getting any press, and it is going to be life-changing for so many YouTube creators.

The premise is simple. You chuck your raw a-roll take into Gling, tell it to detect silences and bad takes, and hit a button. Some AI trickery then takes place, after which you’re left with two things - a full transcript of your video and an edited a-roll take. The latter can be exported to Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Adobe Premiere. You can even review the cuts Gling has made within the transcript and undo or add to them (word-by-word if you wish).

Oh, and did I mention it can work with multicam footage, too?

That 40-minute a-roll take was, within five minutes, reduced to a ten-minute cut which was - bar a few minor instances of bad takes remaining - damn-near ready to be polished, colour graded, and exported for YouTube.

I’ve got my YouTuber pal, Alex, to thank for the tip-off about Gling, and we spent much of yesterday afternoon sending Telegram voice notes to each other expressing our utter disbelief about what we were witnessing. It felt like one of the most pivotal, exciting moments of my business thus far.

It’s hard to explain just how big a deal this is. That 40-minute a-roll edit would have taken me an hour to complete manually and it always feels like a laborious task. Bear in mind that I make, on average, 12 videos each month, that’s well over a day of my time saved. Equally, if you use an external editor, it’s a day of their time you’ll no longer have to pay for.

This brings me to the slightly unsavoury part of this. Tools like Gling replace human effort and this is a coin with two contrasting sides. One features yours truly, grinning from ear to ear having just discovered that he’s about to regain a boatload of invaluable time. The other side features the external video editor who spots Gling and realises that it directly replaces her ability to deliver a service. There’s no grinning on that side of the coin - particularly when the video editor realises that Gling is free to use and supported only by goodwill.

As noted at the start of this newsletter, AI is frightening. It is wiping out job descriptions as fast as it is winning time back for people. There’s no escape from it and, as so many people have pointed out, it’s only going to get better. Gling is, as it stands, the worst version of itself, yet it is already impossibly brilliant. It’s also not a stretch to imagine a future where we have tools like this built directly into the likes of Final Cut Pro.

I found another tool yesterday which could revolutionise short-form video production in my business. It’s called Opus, and it’s capable of spitting out a bunch of fully edited short-form vertical videos after the user has pasted the YouTube link to a widescreen video. It picks the best clips, reframes the footage, and adds engaging captions and emojis. Just like Gling, it leaves you open-jawed.

I sent Opus to my short-form video editor and told him not to worry. Rather than replace him, I saw it as a tool that could help him evolve how he creates content for me. Gling should be viewed by YouTube creators in the same way; it’s important to remember that it only completes half the job. After the a-roll cut comes the addition of b-roll, polishing, and publishing. Someone still needs to do that stuff (for the time being). The speed with which a-roll can now be processed (that’s the right word for it now Gling is here) just means that you can work with your editor to deliver more videos, faster.

If you make video content, I urge you to try these AI tools. They will leave you dumbfounded. Just use them wisely. Please.