NAB Show: Twelve Labs Partners With Blackbird

Twelve Labs, a “video understanding company,” today announced “a major step forward in the world of video editing and storytelling.” It has partnered with Blackbird plc, the technology licensor, developer and seller of the market-leading cloud native video editing platform, Blackbird. Twelve Labs said this partnership “makes state-of-the-art video understanding AI available to Blackbird’s fast, cloud-native editing suite empowering editors to deliver their most meaningful narratives with lightning quick turnaround.”

The integration solves one of the essential challenges of video production; locating specific storytelling moments within vast volumes of video content. Users struggle to identify precise elements spending huge amounts of time searching. Current taxonomy-based approaches are limited in their ability to search in natural language and are costly to enable. Twelve Labs’ AI, however, says it “allows editorial teams to find exact moments using natural language, thereby enabling editors to identify and fully leverage the perfect scenes for their stories with unparalleled speed.”

As part of a commitment to a plugin architecture, Blackbird has added a new plugin embedded into its editing platform. This enables a seamless integration of Twelve Labs and in turn access to its indexing technology and AI auto sequencing productivity tool without ever having to leave the editor.

Analysis of content is performed with no user intervention for a highly efficient workflow which then allows video editors to directly query their footage with natural language search to instantly construct edit sequences for onward crafting or publishing.

Jae Lee, Twelve Labs co-founder/CEO, says: “We envision a future where editors supercharge their workflows. Instead of a blank canvas, they can start with a rough cut and refine it from there, saving countless hours of scrubbing and stitching,” said. “Such a meaningful improvement over current approaches is possible through our work with Blackbird, in conjunction with the future possibilities for integrating our new Pegasus model. Together, we can remove some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks for editors and push the boundaries of what is possible; we can craft the future of narrative excellence.”

Ian McDonough, Blackbird CEO, says: “Blackbird has always prided itself on its speed and efficiency and the advent of AI technologies is key to improving that further. The landscape is changing fast when it comes to storytelling, and where AI can really make a difference is in making the process faster and more enjoyable. Twelve Labs’ technology addresses this well through its fast-developing natural language recognition model and we are excited to be getting closer to offering this to our Blackbird customers,” commented.

Twelve Labs and Blackbird will be showcasing the new AI Integration at The 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 13-17.