With the recent release of Google’s Gemini 2.0 and it’s ability to both watch your screen and talk with you interactively with audio instead of text, there have been a bunch of videos on YouTube in which Gemini teaches you how to use a piece of software – often, the free 3D application Blender, but others as well. As someone who has earned most of his income by teaching people how to use software, I found this to be perhaps a watershed moment in the development of AI in terms of its impact on folks like myself, so I decided to put it to the test in my particular domain: Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Resolve. For the video above, I focused on Final Cut Pro for the sake of brevity.
I tested Gemini’s knowledge throughout a typical editing workflow, including importing media, organizing, rating, keywording, creating a stringout, trimming, audio editing and sweetening, color correction, adding titles and transitions, and exporting. Again, for the sake of brevity I edited the video down to just a few key areas for demonstration.
What did I discover?
Well, at least for Final Cut Pro specifically, this technology is not ready for prime time. Not that it won’t get there, I suspect it will. It had a good high-level understanding of key concepts like whether to store your media inside or outside the library, when to transcode media, how to organize media, the basic approach for color grading, etc. However, the devil is in the details and here is where it would often hallucinate and very confidently provide completely inaccurate information. When I would correct it, it would cheerfully apologize for the confusion (whose confusion?) and try again, usually providing a different, yet still completely inaccurate, response.
I encourage you to not only watch the video to see what I mean, but also check out (and perhaps add to) the comments, which are very detailed and very interesting. While I greatly appreciate (and agree with) the general sentiment that we should carry on doing what we are doing, I do think the runway is limited and it’s time for all of us to think about how to work with this new world that is being foisted upon us.