People are watching more videos online than reading texts. However, while anyone can shoot a video on their phone, not everyone can turn it into an impressive video clip 🙁 Hence, there is an urgent need for a simple video editor with a ‘Create Masterpiece’ button 😉 And here is a fitting example of a platform whose functionality can be taken and copied for this purpose.
The essence of the project
Ozone has made a simple yet powerful video editor that allows an average user to quickly create an impressive short video from footage shot on a phone or camera.
The startup has now raised $7.1 million in investments, although the editor is still in the closed beta testing phase, and you can only join the waitlist on the website. Last winter, it went through Y Combinator with this project, receiving the due check for $500,000.
The speed and efficiency of editing are achieved due to the built-in AI in the editor, which not only suggests how to better edit the original material but can also perform complex and tedious operations that would take a lot of time without its help.
One of the features separately highlighted on the main page of the editor is the ‘super-cut’. The essence of this feature is that the AI analyzes the audio track of the recording and cuts out all the moments with ‘uh’, ‘um’, coughs, and overly long pauses – after which it seamlessly combines the remaining pieces with substantive text into a single smooth sequence.
Among other useful properties of the editor are automatic subtitle addition, color alignment of scenes shot in different lighting (color correction), improving the quality of the recorded voice, animating objects in the video, adding beautiful transitions between scenes, inserting photos and screenshots, and even automatic search for music that would fit well with the resulting video sequence.
If a user is creating a video for their blog, they might need quick feedback from their team. To facilitate this, the editor has a built-in feature for exchanging comments about the video being created in real time.
The finished video can be exported to various publishing channels (YouTube, TikTok, reels), and the editor will intelligently automatically crop the video to the required format, ensuring that the most essential parts of the video remain on screen.
All videos are stored in the platform’s catalog, and in this catalog, you can also search for videos in a smart way – for example, by asking to find all videos with ‘white cars’. The platform automatically identifies objects and other video characteristics for searching.
What’s interesting
Video is becoming the most popular content format on the internet — people watch videos much more often and more than they read texts.
Accordingly, a much larger number of people have started to engage in video creation. As a consequence, more startups with platforms for creating and editing video content have begun to appear.
Some platforms are intended for more professional video creators — like the startup Strada. This startup is creating a marketplace of video processing tools that can work together as part of a single process. The platform is planned to be launched only in the third quarter of next year, but the startup has already raised the first 2 million dollars in investments for it.
Today’s Ozone is focused not on professionals but on regular users. Such users will not bother with choosing and using various complex tools. They want to press one button but ultimately get a ‘masterpiece’. This is the ideal that today’s Ozone is striving for 😉
The creators of Ozone believe that in the near future, video content creation will become synonymous with the phrase ‘storytelling’. And it seems they are not wrong in this forecast.
However, anyone can shoot a video on their mobile phone. But not everyone can turn it into an impressive video.
The startup Storimake, which I wrote about in September, decided to create a marketplace for this purpose, where users can upload shot video, and freelancers will create the finished videos from it. Although this is a rather old-fashioned way to solve the problem, the startup nonetheless managed to raise 1.4 million euros in investments — because the task is relevant.
And indeed, short videos are starting to be widely used not only by influencers.
Guidde has created a platform for making videos that companies can use to train employees on how to work with corporate software, so they don’t have to study documentation that none of them will read anyway 😉 They raised 15.6 million dollars.
Speaking of documentation, not only do few people read it, but even fewer like to write it — including programmers. Therefore, in this context, it’s worth remembering Augmend. They have created a platform where programmers can upload documentation of their code in the form of recorded videos (screen recording plus voice). This startup raised 2.2 million dollars.
Viddy claims that video converts traffic from social networks into purchases much better than regular websites — and therefore created a platform for creating video landing pages for online stores.
Videobot suggests replacing text chatbots, which are now placed on a huge number of websites, with video chats that would show explanatory videos. They raised 2 million euros for this.
But for such video landings like Viddy’s, or video chats like Videobot’s, you need to insert well-edited videos — so that the landings convert well, and the chats explain well. Even the videos recorded by programmers on Augmend, or employees at Guidde, would benefit from being well edited before being used as documentation.
Where to run
If videos are being watched more, if more and more videos are being created — the need for simple, yet powerful video content editors will simply become huge.
So, a promising direction of movement is the creation of such video editors that use AI to provide that very simplicity and power.
The stated functionality of today’s Ozone fits well with the desire of the overwhelming majority of people to get the opportunity to create ‘masterpieces’ without any effort 😉 Thus, it can be used as a template for a ready technical task to create your own video editor.
About the Company
Ozone
Website: ozone.pro
Last round: $7.1M, November 8, 2023
Total investments: $7.6M+, rounds: 3