AI by department · Editorial and assembly
Logging is the most adopted use of AI in this industry, and its risk is not the one people name.
Cutting rooms took to this faster than any other department, for one reason: searching rushes. Six hundred hours of material becomes findable by what somebody said. The exposure is not copyright. It is confidentiality, and it is a contract question.
Last checked September 2026. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
Named, not asserted
The most adopted use in UK television, on the record.
Banijay UK
Speech-to-text transcription with object, scene and character recognition, used to search its programme library. Stated by its director of post production at a Royal Television Society event.
On record
ITV Studios, Lifted Entertainment
The editing tool Quickture used on Love Island to build highlight reels faster; Runway used on Nobody’s Fool in development to visualise the game.
On record
Fremantle
Sizzle reels and pitch decks described by its chief legal officer as 90 per cent or more AI-produced.
On record
DaVinci Resolve 21
IntelliSearch for finding people and content in footage, and Slate ID for clapperboard metadata. Both run on your own material.
Shipping
Named people speaking publicly, or the vendor’s own release notes, checked September 2026. Transcription, auto-sync, slate reading and first-pass selects are the standard uses. This is unscripted and post; on UK scripted drama the trade press went looking for examples and found none.
The risk everybody misidentifies
Uploading unreleased material is a data question, and under an NDA it may already be a breach.
An unproduced screenplay, unreleased rushes and a rough cut are confidential material. Through a cloud service a copy exists on somebody else’s infrastructure, on terms almost nobody in a cutting room has read.
| Question | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|
| Where is this processed | A named jurisdiction and a named provider, not “the cloud”. |
| Does the vendor train on what I upload | No, by default, in writing. |
| What is the retention period | A number of days, with deletion confirmed. |
| Who authorised this tool on this production | A named person in production. |
The other exposure
The generative panel in your timeline is not one model.
Adobe’s September 2026 release puts a Generative Media tool inside the Premiere timeline. It routes to Firefly and also to Veo, Kling, Runway and Luma, none of which states its training data, and Adobe’s commercial-safety claim covers only Adobe’s own models.
What it cannot do
What it cannot do.
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What to learn now
Worth an assistant editor’s attention this year.
Media management, harder than before: knowing where every copy of the rushes is, including the ones a transcription service made. Reading a processing agreement: the training clause, the retention clause, the sub-processor list. And the on-machine version of each feature — the same skill, without the exposure.
