How AI helps Ali Abdaal save hours every week

Ali Abdaal is a doctor turned YouTuber, entrepreneur and best-selling author of Feel-Good Productivity. Suhail Idrees is an Apple engineer, strategy consultant and software developer. Together, they help creators and video editors find joy in their work and create high-quality content through initiatives like FireCut (plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro) and Part-Time YouTuber Academy (a course & community for YouTubers).

FireCut, as an official Adobe Partner in the Adobe Video Ecosystem, offers users a suite of cutting-edge AI-powered editing features that integrate seamlessly with Adobe Premiere Pro — the industry leading video editor packed with hundreds of tools that enable users to craft the perfect story. As exemplified by FireCut, the possibilities with Adobe Premiere Pro are enhanced even further by the surrounding Adobe Video Ecosystem.

In this article, we’ll find out how they got started, why they developed FireCut to help editors save time with AI, and we’ll also get some tips on getting started on YouTube.

How did you begin your journey on YouTube?

Ali: I first created my channel in 2017 when I was studying medicine at Cambridge. At first it was just a couple of travel vlogs and music covers, but then I branched out into videos about study techniques and medical school entrance exams — things I was quite familiar with, and that I thought others might find helpful.

In my mind, I was usually asking myself “What video would I have benefited from a couple of years ago?” to come up with ideas. Over time, I started branching out from exam tips to broader topics like productivity, wealth and finding more fulfilment in life, and I think that journey really helped me figure out what I found most exciting in my own life.

Suhail: My experience has mainly been dabbling with a music channel in the early days when covers were super-popular. That’s when I first tried out video editing tools and eventually found Premiere Pro. I’m not quite at 5M subscribers like Ali (approx. 5M to go) but definitely learned a lot about music and video production through YouTube.

Where did you meet?

Suhail (left) and Ali (right) met at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Ali: We met in our first week at Cambridge at the Pakistan Society. I’d actually seen Suhail on the Freshers Facebook group and found his YouTube channel… he had a few videos of him playing songs like Pirates of the Caribbean on the piano, and his profile pic was him holding a guitar. I remember thinking “damn this guy plays piano AND guitar? He must be so cool, I’d love to be friends with him”

Suhail: We got to know each other well in our first year of university. We realised pretty soon that we’re both quite nerdy and often thought of what projects we could build together. I think we knew we’d end up doing some collaboration, but just weren’t sure what it would be.

Why did you decide to create FireCut?

Ali: The idea kind of emerged organically from the sheer effort we were spending on editing. In my early YouTube days, I would basically just do everything myself — scripting, filming, editing, posting. Then when the channel took off, I hired a team to help me produce content much more regularly and professionally.

But making good content takes a lot of work. Editing is easily the most time-consuming part of the whole process, and we realised there are so many tasks involved that could be automated. Things that you do every time but are often quite manual.

Suhail: I spoke to Ali’s video editors when we were early in the ideation phase to get a sense of where the time goes. A typical Ali Abdaal YouTube video takes ~30 hours of editing time. About 4 hours of that time is just cleaning up the A-roll and cutting out dead spaces, mistakes, repeated takes, filler words, and so on. Another 8 hours is adding in the best possible B-roll (going through Ali’s personal folders of B-roll and tailor-making some more just for the video). Another 6 hours is titles, motion graphics, animations. Another 4 hours is music and sound design. The remaining 8 hours is for other stuff like reviews, refining, sponsor segments, etc.

Of course this is approximate, but we sensed an opportunity here. A lot of this stuff sounded like something that AI could do a decent first pass at, or at least take some of your manual actions and automate them for you (like cutting dead spaces exactly how you like them, even adding J-cuts to smoothen the flow).

Feel-Good Productivity is Ali Abdaal’s New York Times Bestseller about why positive emotions fuel success, and how feeling good in your work can boost your energy, reduce your stress, and enrich your life.

Ali: It’s not just about the time that editing takes. I strongly believe that the secret to productivity is feeling good — it’s very difficult to succeed if you’re working on stuff that doesn’t excite you. If you’re spending most of your time on repetitive tasks that could be automated, then that’s time and energy you could have spent on more artistic and fun stuff — not to mention, that’s where you would probably add the most value.

Suhail: Another important question for us with building anything is “Why now?” — what’s something we can build today that we could not have built a year ago? With the recent release of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Claude, we knew we could create something special that would improve massively on tools that existed at the time.

So, we got to building! But we had an important decision to get right on Day 1 — Ali’s team used both Premiere Pro and FCPX, and YouTube editors in general tend to use a number of other tools as well. So, what do we build exactly? I explored all the major tools and found Premiere Pro to have the right mix of strong in-built capabilities, active community forums, a large userbase — and crucially a powerful API for developers to work with. I found hundreds of Adobe plugins online, tackling editing, content generation, productivity and more, which reassured me that this setup could work out well. There’s even an official marketplace where developers list their plugins.

Ali posted on X (Twitter) in June 2023 to see if his followers were interested in joining a beta test for FireCut, then called “Edit AI”.

We initially started with tackling Ali’s use case (instructional video with a single talking-to-the-camera shot) and we automated key steps in the process, such as cutting silences, adding zoom-ins at key moments, adding chapters when a new topic was introduced. Then we tweeted out from Ali’s account to ask people if they’d like to try it out and immediately got a beta group together. That initial beta user feedback was extremely helpful in guiding our development, because from here, we mostly went off our users’ feedback and suggestions.

How has FireCut helped accelerate the video creation process for your team and your users?

Ali’s team hard at work building content for his YouTube channel and Part-Time YouTuber Academy.

Ali: When it comes to getting to a clean, rough cut before the creative edits, FireCut literally cuts down that time to less than an hour because now we’re reviewing rather than doing everything from scratch ourselves. One of our editors actually switched to Premiere Pro just to be able to use FireCut.

I even find myself becoming more relaxed about recording the original footage because I know the AI will make that first cut a breeze. Where I used to always make sure there are claps when I repeat something so the editor can spot it in the audio waveform, I can now be more relaxed and focus on my delivery of the script rather than putting in cues for the editor.

Suhail: I have had users tell me it has literally cut their editing time in half, letting them get through hours of footage in just a few minutes. For some specific use-cases like podcast editing or educational content, it basically automates almost the entire process.

What are your favourite features?

Ali: I love features like Create highlights (create shorts from long-form video), Add chapters (split your video into chapters with nice transition slides), and Multi-track editing (edit podcast automatically), because they help you edit hours and hours of footage without sifting through it manually because, let’s face it, you have better things to do than re-watching a raw 2 hour podcast or interview multiple times just to make these edits.

Suhail: I think Add captions and Remove silences and have been our most loved features so far. They both give a lot of customizability and control — meaning pro users can really fine-tune the results to fit their needs — while making sure the default settings work well for users who don’t want to tinker too much with the controls.

And I particularly love how Premiere Pro’s own AI features help our plugin perform even better. For example, if your captions don’t look right, you can use “Enhance speech” to clean up the audio and get a more accurate transcription. We also regularly use Premiere Pro’s “Auto reframe” as part of our Create highlights pipeline to go from horizontal to vertical (9:16) for short-form content.

What’s next?

Suhail: We have tons of exciting features in the works, pretty much all coming from user feedback — things like more intelligent cutting of podcasts, a better flow for editing gaming footage, and even tools like swear words removal.

We work very closely with our users to figure out what to build. One recurring theme with FireCut is that our users take an existing feature and apply it in a creative way to make it work for a use case we hadn’t even thought of. For example, users editing gameplay footage would use our “Add Zooms” feature to make the webcam larger on screen at key moments. And to us that signals we should build something that allows users to achieve that output more easily without needing to hack together a workaround.

Can you share a few tips for people who are just starting out as creators and editors?

Ali shares his tips for creating and scaling a YouTube channel in the Part-Time YouTuber Academy.

Ali: I’d say the main thing is to stop overthinking and just do it. In my experience, what holds most people back often isn’t technical. Instead, it’s emotional — fear of what friends, family and colleagues will think. Overthinking. Imposter Syndrome. The whole works. The trick is to just get started, and trust that you can figure the rest out over time.

Another important tip is to make the process as enjoyable as possible so that you’ll want to do it more. This means actively reflecting on which parts of being a creator you enjoy (maybe it’s filming or editing or scripting) and doing as much of those as you can while automating and optimising the rest. For example, if you’re automating your editing, maybe that’s with tools like FireCut or using preset packs or hotkeys, or if you’re optimising your filming, maybe that means having an always-ready camera setup with minimal friction to beginning a filming session.

And finally, the big secret — build a system. Systems give you leverage to help you spend your time focusing on the creative parts that you actually enjoy. If you can systemise your YouTube channel, you’ll be able to put out high-quality content that genuinely impacts your audience and helps you grow, hopefully without sacrificing all of your time along the way.

Suhail: The points around systems and workflow optimisation really resonate from an editor’s perspective as well. I personally really enjoy doing something different in every video, because the first time doing it is always full of learning and exploration. The more you can optimise the stuff that you do in every edit (such as footage cleanup or adding captions), the more time and energy you free up for the more interesting new things.

I think taking a scientific approach to the time spent on editing in Ali’s team really helped identify opportunities for optimisation. And now my inbox is full of people telling me how they’ve gone from spending 5 or 6 hours per edit to just a couple of hours. I don’t think we could have asked for a better outcome with FireCut!

Learn about FireCut’s AI-powered video editing features and about Premiere Pro’s newest features by updating the app today. To enhance your workflow even further, explore the many extensions like FireCut that are available as part of the Adobe Video ecosystem.