77.5% of Surveyed Film Editors Now Use AI, Avid Data Finds

Nearly 78% of surveyed American Cinema Editors members now use AI in post-production. The figure comes from a survey of 120 members of the 1,200-strong professional body, conducted by Avid, the company behind Media Composer and Pro Tools.

The most common use cases are practical, not creative. Transcription leads at 60%, followed by audio cleanup at 55% and shot search across hundreds of hours of footage at 39.2%. Smaller numbers of editors use AI to generate placeholder shots for producers or to tag details of specific shots.

"Nobody grows up saying 'I dream of sinking dailies one day,'" said Matt Feury, Avid's vice president of artist relations, who helped lead the survey. Editors, he said, were "trying to minimize the amount of manual stuff that they have to do that is just part of the process: the media management, the metadata management, things like that."

Why did Avid run the survey?

Feury said the company wanted to test anecdotes it had heard about editors resisting the technology. The data showed the opposite. "Just by nature, editors are always exploring new avenues, new technologies," he said. "They're not really afraid to try things."

The findings track Hollywood's wider engagement with AI across the filmmaking pipeline, from tools produced by companies like Ben Affleck's InterPositive to dabbling in fully AI-animated projects.

Part of the adoption is blunt necessity. Emmy-nominated editor Molly Shock told Variety that many of her peers are learning the tools to stay hireable as Hollywood jobs grow scarcer. "We do recognize it's not going away," she said. "You adapt or die. So that's a pretty big incentive."

What does AI actually change in the edit bay?

Shock points to a recent season of "MasterChef," where she and her colleagues had AI tools for the first time. Producers needed a shot of a contestant looking at a clock for a time check. In past seasons, that meant combing "thousands and thousands of hours" of footage over several hours; now editors found multiple examples within seconds. Some days, she said, half a day's work shrinks to 15 minutes.

"It's smart enough that it recognizes who the contestants are, and you can just say, you know, 'John does time check,'" she said. "It just gives me more time to do the really fun part of editing, the real creative stuff."

Where editors draw the line

Creative control remains the red line. Nearly 100% of daily or weekly AI users said the technology should only enhance the creative vision of their projects. Only 7.5% of respondents said they wanted AI to help with assembling shots or rough cuts — the core craft of editing.

Ethics, copyright and security concerns made up nearly 50% of the barriers to adoption, a sign that Hollywood's unresolved questions about AI still weigh on the industry.

Shock said editors want to learn the tools, but "they just want to make sure we don't set up a new system that just completely eradicates any kind of growth."

"We the editors understand that this AI could be a really cool tool," she said. "We just want to make sure we're included in the conversation of how it's going to be used, and we're not just thought of as a button-pusher." As AI spreads from transcription desk to timeline, that seat at the table is the next thing editors will negotiate.