Month: March 2021

Up front I should state that I have been a fan of EditMentor’s founder Misha Tenenbaum’s work since he first founded EditStock.com. I was excited when he first hinted at what he intended with EditMentor, although I did not envy the challenge.

You see, I have a little insight. For a large part of my career I was an educational designer, and came up with the concept and content for our series of “Intelligent Assistants” – ultimately for Final Cut Pro (classic), Boris Red et al, Cleaner and Media 100. Our goal was simple: let people learn how to use a NLE or similar tool, while working in that app.

That took significant work, but by comparison with what Misha and CTO Gor Vardanyan have done it was nothing. Teaching functions in an NLE is easy. Teacher people why they should use those fi\unctions is not easy.

EditMentor is based around a functional NLE, that runs entirely in a browser (specifically Chrome). A NLE interface that is smart enough to report clip, marker and trims to the back-end for scoring! Add in a student management system, and a complete set of tools for building lessons, EditMentor is an amazing technological achievement.

In the back of my mind I always thought, if I had it to do over, I’d go into Visual Effects. The combination of creativity and technology that goes into VFX fascinates me. Then the reality of the industry that I read about and its financial woes, makes me rather glad my life took a different path.

But what would VFX be like if the tedium – rotoscoping and background removal – were simply a couple of clicks away. The video below compares “traditional” (up to Rotobrush 2 in After Effects) rotoscoping tools, against RunwayML for isolating moving actors, and in filling. Stick around to the end for a preview of ML creating cartoon images based on text descriptions!