After about three years of deeply considering it (which is a long time, even for me and my whole “think about getting a tattoo for a year before I can get it” thing, or my “think deeply about my personal indentity and how I wish to be referred to, testing things out in my head for nine months before mentioning that I was considering it even once” thing), I’ve decided to get into video editing. Not in a huge way. I’m not going to change careers or even get into the super fancy stuff. I just want to be able to do some basic editing: trimming, stitching, simple visual effects (like text on the screen), the occasional blur, and maybe some audio mixing for sound effects. Nothing major, just stuff that would help turn my many video-based ideas into a reality. I mean, I still want to make my “XX Ways To Die In Hyrule” Breath of the Wild video from that time I streamed playing through BotW wearing only hats right before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I also want to take the recordings I’ve made of wrestling events in Final Fantasy 14 and clean them up a bit so I’m not stuck trying to manage the start and end of the files by clicking the start/stop recording button. It’d be nice to be able to clean those up a bit and maybe hide my Party Chat stuff from the video so I can keep it private AND actually participate in it during wrestling events. I’ve also got a lot of ideas for other things bumbling around my head that would be fun to put together, if I could find the parts I need, so I’ve finally started directing a little bit of time and energy towards figuring all that out. And no, I’m not just doing this because I hit the downhill glide portion of my FF14 crafting project and still need to keep myself distracted (well, maybe a little, but it’s entirely coincidental).

As I’ve found out in my research, aided by recommendations from a few people I follow on BlueSky who were kind enough to reply to me, almost all of the video editing tools out there right now are either hopelessly outdated or chock full of shitty “AI” features. Now, a lot of those features are clearly just common tools used in video editing programs to make people’s lives easier that have been rebranded as “AI” to capitalize on the economy’s current obsession with these shitty predictive-text machines, but it’s still incredibly irksome that all my attempts to find a good tool without that schlock have come to naught. I have had a pretty consistent position of extricating myself and my labors from things that push “AI” or are selling out to it, but it has swiftly reached the point where all I can do is ignore those features as they show up since every browser and search engine I’ve used has either been absolutely shitty or regularly entreating me to use its “AI” features. I genuinely don’t know I could go a full day without coming into contact with at least some kind of automation billing itself as “Artificial Intelligence” in a way that requires me to actively work around it. All my documents in Google Drive keep trying to get me to use their gemini tools. All the microsoft products I use at work have copilot crammed into every nonsensical space they can warp to fit it (even ruining the ability of Excel to do reliable math! The one thing it’s basically famous for!). Even my phone, almost eight years old and on an OS so old that half my apps no longer work on it, keeps trying to push “AI” features through the built-in Samsung tools or Verizon’s apps (I actually had to deal with some phone issues a couple weeks back and I think I get passed through a chatbot a couple times in the process). It’s exhausting!

I’m sure I can just do the same in whatever video editing software I wind up using. I’m going to try to find one where there isn’t a way to generate video or anything too scummy included in the free version. I don’t plan to do anything that would require any of the rebranded tools since I’m just gonna blur things, add text, toss in an image of some kind, and trim/stitch clips. All of that should be straight-forward. Well, I sure hope it is. The missing ingredient in all of this is any actual know-how on my part. The extent of my past video editing is trimming recordings using Microsoft Video Player back in the day when it still let you do that without installing the copilot-infested app from their “store.” I can’t really look into how to actually do the editing until I’ve picked a program! I mean, I could maybe look up some best practices and all that, but I’m not sure how much of that would be applicable from one video editor to another since I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of them have proprietary file types to keep you working in their application unless you’ve paid for a premium subscription or something. That IS the way of capitalism these days and the idiotic pell-mell run toward “AI” makes it clear that all of these companies are as embroiled in capitalistic value-extraction as any other modern company. Maybe I’m entirely off-base and I’ve just had the bad luck of only finding programs with “AI” built-in because that’s what shows up at the top of search results these days as everyone tries to manipulate SEO to get as much attention as possible, but I’m still resigning myself to almost clicking “AI” garbage buttons as I try to find the thing I actually want.

This stupid bubble can’t pop soon enough. I mean, I know it might kill the US economy and drastically disrupt the world economy when that happens, but I’m so tired of the constant shit getting shoved into my every waking moment. From political ads to “check out this video! Anything that isn’t an AI-generated procedural video game is cooked!” videos that show the dumbest, worst-looking visuals with absolutely no consistency or sense to them, it’s everywhere and I’m so tired of it. I mean, I can still look at a picture an tell almost instantly if it’s generated or not. There’s a few edge cases here or there and I’ve been wrong a small number of times (but only in thinking a real video is fake), but it’s usually pretty obvious because anything that isn’t trying to pretend it ISN’T “AI” is so shitty that it’s obvious. I mean, no one cares! Clearly even the person making it cares so little that they were willing to put out this absolute trash. It’s just exhausting–soul-wearying–to be a creative person these days as all of this crap gets trotted out and shoved forward so much that actual human-created art gets lost. I just want to make silly little videos for my friends’ D&D characters or clean up my wrestling recordings enough that I can post them to the youtube channel I’m making with the FF14 wrestling group’s leaders. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for and yet it feels like more and more of an unmet demand with each passing day…