AI editing tools are multiplying at a rate of knots – but which is the best AI video editor? Most of these tools do the same basic things (remove silence, automatically add animated captions, clean up your audio, and similar functions), making them immensely popular among those working against tight deadlines.
But what about AI-powered tools that can actually edit and meaningfully contribute to a video editing workflow?
In this post, we’ll examine a handful of emerging AI video editing tools that promise to speed up the editing process in radical new ways. Think prompt-to-edit, or your own automated assistant editor. They can even be paired with an AI video generator or other automated tools for video creation.
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Why Look For the Best AI Video Editor?
It’s important to note that these video tools are all being actively developed, and at the rate AI is going, the features and capabilities we discuss here could look quite different just a few months from now.
But when the results live up to the hype, using an AI powered video editor to help create videos has several benefits.
- Speed: Get started faster, get to a rough cut faster, and deliver faster.
- Efficiency: AI tools can handle repetitive tasks more effectively than us.
- Focused effort: All this time saved on prep could give you more time to create.
- Iteration cycles: Try new ideas more rapidly with help from AI.
- Experimentation: You could set two or three agentic AI editors running and see which delivers the most interesting version of the cut.
Are there any reasons why you might not want to rely on an AI video tool to edit video? Absolutely:
- Most of these tools are in beta and are not production-ready.
- Many of them require new ways of working, with a learning curve to match.
- The main way to improve as an editor is to edit, and it’s harder to develop your skills, tastes, and experience if you’re not actually doing the work.
- It’s hard to trust any of these AI tools that they’ve actually chosen the best bits without checking yourself.
But just like the best AI video generators, these tools are definitely in your future and can have real benefits – whether you’re creating video for a feature film or your YouTube channel. So you may as well play with them. Here’s our detailed breakdown of five of the most popular.
1. Eddie AI
What it does: Eddie is your new assistant editor. It can log footage, add descriptions and metadata, create rough cuts of multi-camera interviews, analyze source material, and build an edit with a story framework based on your prompts. Put simply: Eddie can do it all.
Why it’s good: In my brief testing it took about 15 minutes for it to “import” (presumably transcoding and transcribing) three hours of interview material on a 2025 M4 Max Macbook Pro. The text summary Eddie generated was detailed and accurate.
The first-time user experience was very smooth: The UI teaches you how to use the app step-by-step and generates a first edit in about 20 minutes of experimenting. It created each section of its four-part story framework (intro, conflict, resolution, and conclusion) in stages so I could review and iterate on each part separately.
This all worked pretty well. I was impressed.
What is still beta: The rough cut is still very much a rough cut in every sense of the word, so some of the edits were pretty clunky (because it only has the transcript to go on). But it did a pretty decent job of creating something that was semi-coherent and mostly interesting to watch.
The problem was that the clips it chose kind of made sense in isolation, but they didn’t really talk to each other, which made the flow of the story rather confusing.
How to try it: While some of Eddie’s features that were originally all online are still available to test, Eddie is now mostly a desktop app that works on both Mac and Windows. Download the app and log in with Google account authentication to get started.
Pricing: The free tier enables you to create and view edits from interviews with two project exports as MP4s (with “light branding”) per month. The Plus subscription is $25/month with four projects and more features.
Final thought: What Eddie’s team are building feels like the logical conclusion of what happens when AI prompting meets video editing. And it will only get more effective.
As a professional editor, I’m not convinced that AI editors (at least in the short term) will get past the inherent responsibility placed on human editors: Watch all the footage, find the best bits, make something, persuade the client these really are the best bits.
That said, Eddie’s tools like automated logging and multi-cam editing should help editors get started faster, leaving more time to polish as a result.
2. Descript – Underlord
What it does: Descript’s Underlord was initially a clever AI-powered feature set you could activate at the push of a button or two. It would remove silences, clean up your audio, generate AI avatars and more than 20 other tasks.
Today, has evolved into a fully-fledged agentic editor co-pilot you can command to “vibe edit” your way to a finished video.
Why it’s good: Because Underlord has access to your transcripts, video, and audio, it can see and hear your source footage and final edit. This should improve the quality of the results.
What’s really helpful is that the UI provides plenty of details about what Underlord is thinking or doing, so that you can monitor its plans and execution.
I uploaded a 40-minute interview and asked it to create a five-minute summary with its own narrative arc from conflict to resolution. This mostly worked. But the edits were pretty rough – especially when I removed the filler words and asked Underlord to edit for clarity.
Despite these wrinkles, it’s incredibly impressive and very obvious where these tools will get to very quickly.
What is still beta: Underlord’s has had task-based abilities for a while, and they’re still accessible at the click of a button, but the new agentic chatbot interface is still in beta. However, sometimes it suggests things that don’t always seem correct.
How to try it: Head over to Descript.com and give it a whirl. At the time of writing it’s free to use.
Pricing: Standard Descript has a free trial that lets you experiment with their AI tools, but if you want to do any real work in the browser-based app, you’ll need a paid subscription starting at $16/month.
Final thought: Given that Descript is building on an existing product that already has comprehensive text-based video editing features and useful AI-powered fixes (such as eye contact and ADR) it feels like they have a head start on delivering an agentic video editor that can deliver usable results. It’s also very flexible, allowing you to use the built-in editing tools or the agent when you choose to.
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3. Electric Sheep
What it does: Electric Sheep combines generative AI video, agentic editing (prompt to edit), and AI-powered VFX tools (such as automatic rotoscoping and in-painting) into a single platform.
Why it’s good: While it feels like everything Electric Sheep has to offer is useful, it’s not a platform you can pick up and start using right away (which is a good thing). As the sizzle video above demonstrates, there is a learning curve to working with generative AI video that includes fixing errors, repeatedly re-generating clips, and understanding the mechanics of how to prompt effectively.
These skills could be considered editing adjacent, so you might have some sense of what to do, but you will need to embrace something of a learning curve to use platforms like this.
What is still beta: Media uploads are limited to HD H.264 mp4 or .mov files 15 seconds or less.
How to try it: Electric Sheep has a free trial that includes 150 AI credits to play with.
Pricing: Electric Sheep currently costs $5/month to use, and you pay for AI partner credits on top of that. For example, generating a five-second video clip used 100 Veo credits.
Final thought: Presumably, the name refers to the Philip K. Dick novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, which became Blade Runner. But it’s not a very compelling brand.
Most of the features I played with briefly worked, or worked a little, while others didn’t work at all. For example: I prompted the edit chatbot to add text to the video, which it claimed it did, but I couldn’t see anything. It still feels very beta, so maybe I should give it time!
4. Spingle AI
What it does: Spingle is slowly opening from closed beta at the moment, but it promises some interesting features that I’ve not seen in other AI video editing tools.
Why it’s good: Uniquely, Spingle suggests that it can clean up your raw footage by cutting anything too shaky, overexposed, out of focus, or otherwise unusable. It does this by uploading everything to the cloud (an hour of footage will take about an hour for Spingle to prep). But the user interface is inside Adobe Premiere Pro, so most of you will feel right at home. A DaVinci Resolve plugin is coming soon.
Tip: Use proxies and a fast internet connection to speed up this initial process. Or leave it running overnight if you need to process a lot of footage (but you should still use proxies).
In my own testing, Spingle took about 20 minutes to chew through around 30 minutes of raw documentary footage – but only 30 seconds to cull/clean that footage, pulling out the shaky, out-of-focus or unusable footage. This was pretty remarkable to watch, and the results were very good.
I also tested the search feature prompting it to find all of the usable b-roll footage of a specific item within the raw rushes. It also did this remarkably well. Because the analysis data is cached locally, it all happens in a few seconds.
Another interesting upcoming feature promises to provide the ability to “train Spingle on past projects to create your own custom AI templates for any style you want.” Obviously, this has benefits if you are a decent editor and want it to replicate a specific client’s stylistic choices, but it could also allow you to rip off another editor’s style.
(Which is actually how you learn to edit in the first place, but now it will be automated and you’ll learn nothing.)
What is still beta: Everything. But you can keep up with the latest features that are shipping to beta users every week here.
How to try it: Fill in the early access form and download the latest version.
Pricing: Undisclosed.
Final thought: What I like about Spingle is that it’s being developed for video editors, by video editors. For example, when it automatically makes selects based on your prompt it does so by lifting these up onto track 2, which is how I pull my selects today.
The current version is very impressive and truly delivers an AI assistant who can help you speed up your editorial workflow. Whatever they manage to create, it looks like it will fit nicely into existing editorial workflows, making it a genuine win for human editors.
5. AutoPod
What it does: Autopod is a suite of tools designed for video podcasters and multi-camera interview formats. It automatically cuts between camera, chooses social media clips, and removes silence from sections of your source footage.
Why it’s good: Using Autopod will save you hours of time getting to a first cut of a multi-camera interview. This is a huge win, as most of the time this process involves cutting to the person speaking and maybe hiding an edit with a cutaway of someone else nodding in agreement. Pretty boring work.
Video podcasts are one of the fastest-growing media formats at the moment, especially as more of YouTube’s viewers turn to longer content (20 minutes-plus) on TVs – so the demand for this kind of editing will likely only increase.
Autopod only works in Adobe Premiere Pro, however, and requires individual audio tracks per speaker in order to figure out who to cut to. Hopefully you have those anyway, but if you were planning on using it to cut between cameras of a single speaker, you can’t.
How to try it: Start a free trial at Autopod.fm.
Pricing: Autopod costs $29/month, although you get the first month free.
Final thought: This kind of auto-editing feature has already found its way into DaVinci Resolve 20 and, I’m sure, in due time, Adobe Premiere Pro natively.
That said, Autopod is (AFAIK) the OG of this technique. This feels like the kind of AI that will help editors get their work done more efficiently, but could also deliver good enough results that some clients might be happy to accept – and, therefore, work us out of a job.
A double-edged sword.
The Best AI Video Editor + MASV: Let’s Get Automated
So which is the best AI video editor?
- Of all the tools in this list, AutoPod seemed the most trustworthy. I say this because you can see what it’s doing and adjust everything it’s done – all the cuts are right there on the timeline.
- Eddie AI is developing what look like some really useful features, such as auto logging and creating stringouts, but I don’t think I would trust it with rough cuts of interviews just yet.
- Spingle AI was also very impressive as an AI assistant that can streamline your editorial workflow.
While all these tools still feel pretty beta right now, there’s no doubt that this, perhaps even combined with an AI video generator to generate videos, is the future of video editing. It really all depends on your requirements: Learn what these tools can do, what they can’t, and what you’re happy to entrust them with.
My advice as a film editor: Experiment to figure out when offloading a task to an AI editor is beneficial to your workflow (such as audio clean up), and where it could have a negative effect in terms of ensuring you produce the best version of your project.
And while you’re at it, why not pair MASV fast file transfer with your favourite AI video editor? You can integrate MASV with your favorite cloud storage for automatic file transfers with no coding required. Because automations aren’t just for AI platforms, after all.
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