A client has asked me to replace their video editor for a video podcast. It’s the standard quick-cut style, zooms, loud transitions, and big bubble-letter subtitles throughout.
They recommended using Descript, which looks to be an AI platform that does all the work for you. Throw your video/audio into the site, and it transcribes the video, allowing you to edit based on the transcription. It then makes AI recommendations and inserts zooms and transitions.
There’s no getting around using AI for some of this, like subtitle generation, but I’d rather not buy a sub to an AI platform, nor would I like to use one, so I’m looking for alternatives. The pay certainly isn’t worth the time it would take without cutting corners unfortunately.
Unfortunately, Davinci Resolve isn’t playing well with my system and the nvidia driver I use (580, it worked on 550 but that’s not an option in Additional Drivers anymore for some reason) results in a black screen for the video timeline (not ideal for a video editor haha). I’ve been playing around with Kdenlive and Blender’s video editor.
I found an add-on for both programs that transcribes speech-to-text, which I finally got mostly working with Kdenlive (using whisper) but not with Blender. I also found a FOSS app called audapolis which does well pulling a transciption into an exportable file.
Anyone have any experience making these mass-produced-style videos without going full AI? My client mentioned the old VE spent 1-2 hours with Descript for a 15ish min video and 2 shorts. I’m ok doubling that timeframe at first if it means not using Descript.
Interesting. I’m struggling to get transcription add-ons to work in Blender. I’ve never installed python script stuff so I don’t know if I screwed something up. Every time I try transcription it either just stops around 95% or crashes with
Unable to load any of {libcudnn_ops.so.9.1.0, libcudnn_ops.so.9.1, libcudnn_ops.so.9, libcudnn_ops.so} Invalid handle. Cannot load symbol cudnnCreateTensorDescriptor Aborted (core dumped)Do you have a suggestion of where I can get started learning about what you’re talking about?
I think this libcudnn is a Nvidia CUDA thing. I guess you have checked that the correct CUDA libs are installed and blended has permission and knows where to look for them?
First start for learning blender Python API would be it’s documentation: https://docs.blender.org/api/current/index.html
In general you can skip anything that you can do on the user interface. But video editing is just a very small part of this and if you don’t have any programming experience yet this could be overkill for what you are looking for.
Perhaps someone had the same problems like you before and implemented something. Maybe searching explicitly for blender video editing automation or Python API will give you some results.
Honestly I’m new to Linux from about 3 months ago, so it’s been a bit of a learning curve on top to learning VE haha. I didn’t realize CUDA had versions let alone was anything other than an acronym for using GPU (Nvidia for me) and I now figure CUDA is probably why Davinci Resolve isn’t working right. Kdenlive’s search for GPU over CPU had CUDA versions listed (mines 12.0, it was searching for 12.3,4,5 etc) which made me realize CUDA and Nvidia drivers differ.
So long story short, no I haven’t checked that beyond looking for how to update CUDA haha. I really appreciate you taking the time, I’ll look into implementing python next. One thing I love about Linux, I’m constantly learning.