Google Cloud And Avid Join Forces To Inject AI Into Video Editing Process

Google Cloud has set a multi-year partnership with Avid as the companies look to add generative and agentic AI tools to the video editing process.

The team-up was announced ahead of Saturday’s start of the NAB Show in Las Vegas, where both companies will have a significant presence.

As part of the agreement, Google’s Gemini models and Vertex AI will be incorporated directly into Avid’s setup, which the companies say will significantly reduce the time required for media discovery and production. Avid will add the Google AI to Media Composer, its non-linear editing system for professional film and TV; and Content Core, a new cloud-native, software-as-a-service platform.

In a blog post, Google Cloud said recent clients have included major local TV station owner Gray Media; Major League Baseball; and NBCUniversal.

Along with new programming, the blog post observed, “media organizations sit on decades of archived footage that is difficult to search through and expensive to manage. AI can automatically tag every scene and shot, making massive video libraries as searchable as the web. This helps teams find and reuse content in seconds, opening up new ways to monetize archives through hyper-local streaming and more relevant viewer experiences.”

France’s Canal+ is one recent media player to incorporate Google’s AI tools to help organize its archives.

In an interview with Deadline, Buzz Hays, a film producer and former Lucasfilm exec who is now Google Cloud’s Global Market Lead Entertainment Industry, said the potential of mining libraries is vast. With so much investment in original microdramas, for example, IP holders could use the technology being brought to market by Google Cloud and Avid to repackage library series.

“In a half-hour, 22-minute comedy series, there are seven acts, because an act was considered that chunk between commercials,” Hays noted. “So you already have the ability to take a series and turn it into a micro series that you wanted to. … It’s a very interesting possibility, especially given how expensive content production has gotten.”

Avid CEO Wellford Dillard said the company’s customers “are asking for intelligent tools that plug into existing workflows and scale with their creativity.” The Google Cloud partnership is helping meet that need, and it “strengthens our ability to deliver secure, AI-driven innovation–while keeping Avid interoperable and adaptable across the broader production landscape,” Dillard added.

Anil Jain, global managing director of strategic industries for Google Cloud, said the collaboration signals that the industry is “moving beyond simple automation.” An editor accessing the AI-infused Avid tools “can now collaborate with an intelligent agent to create assets on the fly and handle the heavy lifting of matching styles and filling timelines, enabling them to focus on storytelling instead of infrastructure.”