You shot the whole thing. The interview, the b-roll, the walk-up you made your subject do four times. Then you sit down to cut it and there’s one shot that you missed; it’s a wide shot of the building at dusk, though you were not standing there at dusk and nobody is paying you to drive back.
Firefly’s video editor will build that shot off a frame of the footage you already have. You scrub to a frame, say what you want the camera to do next, and because it’s working from your own pixels, the clip comes back matching the grade and the framing of whatever sits on either side of it.
The editor itself is free to open in a browser, and a Firefly plan starts at $9.99 a month.
The Shot You Didn’t Get
Generate a scene from a frame shot outdoors in July and it’ll work off your own pixels, so the new clip inherits the look of the footage it came from instead of being something you have to color match for 20 minutes because everything is gray and gloomy.
That’s the difference between using Firefly and just prompting a video model cold. A cold prompt gives you a clip that belongs in somebody else’s video. A frame from your own timeline gives you the same lens, the same light and the same wall color, which means you can actually drop it into the middle of a sequence and not have everyone wonder what happened.
Three Seconds Costs You 300 Credits
Adobe charges generative credits by the second and by the resolution. A second of 1080p costs 100 credits, 720p costs 50, and 540p costs 20.
For just an insert shot, it’s pretty cheap. Three seconds of 1080p will use up 300 credits, and the $9.99 Standard plan gives you 2,000 a month, so you’ve got enough in the tank for six missing shots a month on the cheapest paid tier. If you’re in the bad habit of missing shots, the Pro tier is $19.99 and gives you 4,000 credits to use.
The Rest of the Timeline
Quick Cut released back in February and reads your clips, then assembles a first draft from a sentence describing what you want, which means you can start a project from a rough edit instead of an empty timeline.
Enhance Audio will come in and clean up the noise floor on footage for you, so if you shot something in a room with a fridge in it, scrubbing it out won’t be a pain. Color adjustments give you exposure and contrast without an export. There’s a built-in Adobe Stock panel too, though the free assets are the ones that download free and anything marked with a crown still wants a Stock plan.
One Long Video, Five Short Ones
Say you’ve got a 40-minute interview sitting on a drive. Upload it, tell Quick Cut what the short version is about, and it pulls the moments that match and sequences them for you, so the first draft of a 90-second cut takes about as long as describing it.
Then you add the captions, drop in a Stock shot where the audio gets dry, and if the cut needs a wide that doesn’t exist in the footage, you already know where to get one.
Firefly is free to try at adobe.com, so you can do a test run before you shell out the $9.99 for the Starter plan.
