As threatened last week, I have now sent the Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse videos through Quik, and the results can be seen below.

Leasowe Castle Quik version

Leasowe Lighthouse Quik version

The initial results were not that great.  I had to go back into iMovie and do a lot of pre-editing to make sure that Quik was actually concentrating on the actual subjects of each video, i.e. the castle and the lighthouse.  There can be no doubt that we have not yet reached the point where Quik’s AI understands the context of the video.  Instead, it clearly focusses on parts of the video that show rapid change, presumably because they are likely to be more visually stimulating, and Quik was clearly written for GoPro cameras and athletes trying to achieve death-defying stunts.

That is all fair and square, but for that reason I do not understand why GoPro does not allow more human interaction during the editing process.  Surely, it is not all that technically challenging to allow users to ‘highlight’ one way or another what they think are the key moments of the video, and for Quik to then work around that…?

However, once I had edited the videos to the point where Quik had no choice but to show the parts that I wanted shown, I am very impressed with the result.  Grudgingly, I have to admit that I think the final Quik edit is actually better than my edits.  Part of that is of course that Quik is absolutely ruthless in cutting away anything not crucial to the movie, while I of course will always have the tendency to show all the footage I have taken.

I was contemplating to put a poll here to see what other people think about which is the better version of each video, but I think I know the outcome, and I will not like it, so decided to do away with it…

On a marginally related note, there were also quite a few technical difficulties to import the movies into Quik, which I will explain below for those with a wish to experiment with it themselves…

Continue reading “Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse ― The Quik Edits” →