AI-powered video creation and editing

Market opportunity

Making professional video creation accessible

Traditional video-editing products were processor-heavy desktop tools designed for specialists. Content creators, course creators, and social-media marketing managers often depended on expert editors or outsourced production. Emerging AI capabilities and a lightweight SaaS delivery model created an opportunity to make professional video creation accessible to non-editors.

Why SaaS + AI created an advantage

A browser-based SaaS product could remove the installation, hardware, and specialist-skill barriers associated with traditional video-editing software. AI could then automate time-consuming work such as summarizing source content, creating a storyboard, selecting visuals, and preparing a first edit. Together, these advantages gave Pictory a focused entry point: help non-editors turn existing content into professional, shareable videos in minutes.

Strategic implication: Rather than competing feature-for-feature with professional editing suites, we could prioritize speed to value, guided automation, and an experience designed around the jobs of content and marketing teams.

Customer problem & insights

Creator's pains

As part of content based marketing, so much content is developed in the form of blogs,technical articles and whitepapers. Almost all of it is text heavy and is not suitable for easy and effective consumption.

It is a known fact that video drives engagement and drives traffic to the product, generate leads and helps in greater customer acquisition. Most of the marketing teams rely on expert video editors and outsource video production. The approvals,team management,resource management is an additional overhead.

"Marketing managers across industries spent $135 Billion dollars in 2017 on video content."

On the other hand, there are long-form videos of conferences, interviews, courses and are not suitable to be shared on the social media. It is not easy to extract snippets from the video and share without relying on a video editor.

While producing video content, there are multiple takes and it is time consuming to identify the right take. Also, adding subtitles, voice-over, B-rolls, background music require licensed content and rely on multiple softwares.

Product thesis & success criteria

Magic wand for videos

We wanted to make the most usable video editing software for content creators and marketing managers who want professional video content worth sharing on social media.

"Video boosts conversion rates by 80%. LinkedIn Videos get shared 20x more often"

Product strategy & MVP scope

Create. Edit. Share

Through qualitative and quantitative user research by interviewing multiple Marketing Managers, Video Editors we identified main themes for Pictory so that we create compelling videos in minutes.
- Automatically summarize text content.
- Automatically create video story board.
- Automatically add voice-over and background music.
- Customize the video and publish.

DESIGN WORKFLOWS

Turning the product strategy into an end-to-end experience

Entry point

Accommodating all the scenarios.

Video from text

URLs or script to a summarized text

Users could write a script and every line break or the period is considered as an individual scene in the video. Also users could give an URL and text is extracted and summarized with help of AI and scenes are created.
There are actions users can take on summarized text like :
1. Highlight sentences to be included in the video
2. Remove highlights or Delete scenes
3. Reorder scenes

Editing videos like a document

Long form videos to consumable snippets.

I designed a split screen interface, with Video preview on the right and transcribed text on the left. There are actions to be taken on the top bar and on contextual menu. All the video tools are available on the video preview window.
There have been multiple iterations of this step and the UI has evolved over a period.

Highlights from the video

AI powered snippets.

Users could manually highlight videos to create snippets or let AI choose the best scenes from the transcribed text.

Also users can remove silenses or filler words from the video with a toggle switch. There were many iterations on the best way to set a threshold to se the silence duration.

Audio enabled

Recording audio scene by scene.