How Creative Pros Are Using AI Today
- Richard Adler
- Sep 22
- 4 min read
Ever tried one of those mechanical bulls at a country western bar? Me neither.
Luckily, these days you don’t have to. Upload a photo into an AI tool, type in a prompt: someone riding a bull, crowd cheering, laptop in one hand, phone in the other. Voilà, you’ve got a perfect snapshot of what it feels like to keep up with AI in the production world: thrilling, unpredictable, and a little overwhelming at times.
Instead of asking whether to embrace or reject AI, we looked at the tools creative pros are already using to make their work faster, sharper, and more fun. From video and photo to sound and audio production, we asked a few members of team RMP which tools are making the biggest difference day to day. Here’s what they had to say.
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Video Editing
Pro: Mike Wood
Title: Editor
AI Tools: Adobe Premiere Pro
Remix in Essential Sound automatically extends or shortens music tracks to fit a scene’s length.
Scene Detection: Cuts up a long video file into usable clips by detecting shot changes.
These tools are like having an assistant editor...they get me to the creative phase sooner, freeing up time for the work that actually matters.
Pro: Pierre Jampy
Title: Director of Photography, Editor
AI Tools: Adobe Premiere Pro
Auto transcription
Scene detection
Background noise removal
Multi-cam color correction
These time-savers are especially helpful on smaller budgets, letting editors clean and sync footage quickly without getting bogged down in repetitive fixes.
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Still Photography
Pro: Will O'Hare
Title: Photographer
AI Tools:
ImagenAI & Evoto for batch photo editing
Adobe Generative Expand & Object Removal for quick cleanups
With client expectations higher than ever, these tools let me meet tight deadlines like event clients who want images for social media the same day. The tech saves me many hours and can often keep quality high (but requires review).
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Sound Editing and Voice Over
Pro: Saki Bharti
Title: Director of Photography
AI Tools:
Midjourney + ChatGPT for storyboarding
ElevenLabs for voiceover
Generative Fill in Premiere
These tools speed up pre-visualization and client communication. Creativity will always reign supreme, but AI makes it easier to show clients exactly what they’ll get before we shoot.
Pro: David Sandwisch
Title: Sound Mixer and Editor
AI Tool: Sound Designer Plugins for ProTools including Acon Extract:Dialogue, Supertone Clear, Accentize dxRevive, Accentize Chameleon Surround Reverb
These tools can salvage audio that used to be unsalvageable. They aren’t perfect yet, but compared to four years ago, the speed and results are game-changing.
Pro: Kyle Kelley
Title: Video Producer & Editor
AI Tool: Resolve Transcription + Dialogue Isolation
Not flawless, but way better than manual editing—and the dialogue isolation is especially solid.
Pro: Nate Riedel
Title: Producer, Editor
AI Tool: Premiere Pro plugins and built-in tools for audio
Audio Cleanup has been really useful within premiere pro.
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Photo Editing
Pro: Danny Feighery
Title: Director of Photography
AI Tool: Generative Fill in Photoshop
Lasso, remove, done. Perfect for prepping storyboards, marketing materials, or just getting rid of distracting elements fast.
Pro: Harry Leff
Title: Marketing Strategist
Tool: Instagram AI tools for cleaning up visuals
I used Instagram’s AI to remove a pink sneaker from a photo so the focus stayed on the dogs. It’s small things like this that make content sharper, faster.
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Workflow Rescue
Pro: Danny Shaw
Title: Editor
AI Tool: ChatGPT to debug a corrupted XML from DaVinci Resolve.
It found the errors, fixed the code, and re-encoded the file in minutes. That saved hours of back-and-forth.
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Scriptwriting & Transcription
Pro: Miguel Cevallos
Title: Editor, Camera Operator
AI Tool: Nano-Banana
These tools can save time and money when used right, but matching storyboards and brand visions is a much harder thing to do. However, the technology seems to grow every day, so we'll see!
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Creative-Adjacent
Pro: Kevin Moedt
Title: Senior Digital Sales Manager
AI tool: OpenAI / ChatGPT - for creating visuals that get incorporated into proposals.
If I want to organize a monthly or annual budget for a client, I can go into chat and prompt it to build an excel file
The Big Picture
While some creative professionals are flying (quite literally) with this new technology, not everyone in the industry has a use for it just yet. Most of the hard 'no’s' came from on-set professionals like Hair and Makeup Artists, Camera Operators, and Sound Engineers. These are very physical jobs, not desk roles that rely on the latest tech. I also received a couple of answers that fell into the bucket of automation rather than AI, as we discussed in our previous post "AI-Powered Content: Defining the Line."
But among those adapting, I’m hearing a more uplifting message about productivity and speed than I expected. After all, the RMP team is about to complete our first broadcast commercial utilizing generative AI for character development and manipulation.
That said, I get a little uneasy when people call this the biggest change of our lifetimes. A lot of us don’t want to sound dated, old, or left behind if we express any uncertainty with these tools. Yes, it’s huge, but I still remember when the internet first showed up at my house and ran off the phone line. The battle for the phone line was real, especially with two teenage sisters.
When production shifted from film and tape to fully digital workflows, plenty of old-school filmmakers declared storytelling dead. Instead, new tools opened new doors, and now we all carry 4K cameras in our pockets.
We’ve seen massive shifts before and learned to navigate the upsides and the downsides. The real question isn’t whether to resist or worship every new tool, but where it fits in our workflows. For us, that means testing AI in real projects, learning where it helps, and knowing where the human touch still makes all the difference.
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