The AI Post Stack
Stop collecting tools and start covering jobs. There are six jobs an AI post stack needs to do — and most of them are already sitting inside the editor you own, waiting for you to notice.
Every month somebody sends me a list titled something like "37 AI tools every editor needs." Nobody needs 37 tools. Tool lists organized by brand go stale in a quarter, and they train you to shop instead of think. So here's the reframe that will outlast every product launch between now and whenever you read this: organize your stack by job, not by brand. The jobs don't change. The logos do.
When a new tool crosses your feed, the question isn't "is this cool?" It's "which job does this do, and is it better than what's already doing that job for me?" Most of the time the honest answer is no — because, as we'll get to, the job is probably already covered by software you own.
The six jobs
Strip away the marketing and an AI post stack has to cover exactly six jobs:
- Transcription & text-based editing — turn every clip into searchable, cuttable text. The gateway job; everything else in this course leans on it.
- Selects & assembly — flag usable takes, group them by scene, and stack a first assembly you can react to instead of starting from a blank timeline.
- Color first-pass — auto-balance and shot-match clips so the timeline starts consistent, saving your grading hours for the actual look.
- Audio cleanup — dialogue isolation, noise reduction, hum removal. The job that rescues location sound you thought was dead.
- Upscaling & restoration — AI upscalers and restoration passes for archival footage, cropped-in shots, or mixed-resolution projects.
- Captions & reframing — subtitles, burn-ins, and aspect-ratio reframes for delivery to every platform your film has to live on.
That's the whole map. Any tool anyone ever pitches you slots into one of those six boxes — and if it doesn't, it's probably a solution hunting for a problem.
Check what you own before you subscribe
Here's the part that saves you real money: most of this stack now lives inside the NLEs you already have. DaVinci Resolve ships with transcription, audio cleanup tools, and machine-assisted color features built in — and its free version is famously generous. Premiere Pro has folded in transcription, text-based editing, and auto-captions as standard timeline features. Five years ago each of those jobs was a separate subscription; today they're menu items. So before you give a startup your card number, open the software you own and check whether the job is already sitting under a menu you've never clicked.
The corollary for anyone on a short film or a spec project: free tiers will carry you. Between Resolve's free version, trials, and the free allowances on standalone tools, you can cover all six jobs on a short without spending anything. Subscriptions make sense when you're cutting constantly and a paid tier saves you hours every week — that's a working-editor decision, not a day-one decision. Build the habit on free tools first; upgrade when the bottleneck is real and you can name it.
An editor I work with kept a spreadsheet of AI subscriptions — at one point she was paying for four different tools. When we actually audited it against the six jobs, two of them were doing the same job as each other, and a third duplicated something Premiere had added natively that year. She cut down to one paid tool plus what her NLE already did, and her workflow got faster, not slower — fewer round-trips between apps. Audit by job, and the stack shrinks itself.
Next chapter is the unglamorous one that saves your film: how to run all of these tools without ever putting your original footage at risk.
Recut is this course in tool form — an AI edit assistant that pulls selects from your footage, builds a first assembly, and preps cutdowns, ready to polish in your own editor.