Using the iPhone A13 Bionic for high-powered video editing

How we used Apple’s new silicon speed demon to cut mobile video-editing times by 10x.

Apple’s A13 Bionic chip is a beast. Just on raw speed, it outranks pretty much every other mobile chip out there, and probably most desktop chips as well. The new iPhones are so powerful in terms of graphics and raw speed, that they make the last generation of game consoles look like the abacus.

What’s really special about these chips is that they let you do advanced AI completely on device. They are especially great for intelligently processing images and, if you really push the limits, video.

As iOS developers, we wanted to figure out a way to use all that raw power. So we thought about what was the most memory-intensive, crash-prone, time-consuming multimedia task you could do on a desktop PC. And then try to use the AI chip to do it on mobile.

Our answer: video-editing. Our goal was to get Apple’s insane Bionic chip to do all the grunt work, so from the user’s perspective it would be 10x faster to create videos.

What takes time in video-editing

Video-editors spend a lot of time doing the following tedious tasks.

Searching through footage to find relevant clips

Searching through footage to find the high-quality, best looking clips

Replaying footage to cut it in the right place

We realized we could use AI to do all of these things automatically. And we could do it all on-device using Apple’s new chip.

All the video clips are tagged by content automatically

What we did was:

Run every frame of the video through AI to automatically tag it by content

Use AI to rate every clip for quality, on composition, aesthetics etc

Use an automatic algorithm to cut footage into clips automatically to start with

The new interface for the video app

User Interface

Our approach to editing video turned out to require a totally different UX. Instead of using a horizontal timeline, you would type and search to add clips to a storyboard. The app would automatically show the best-rated clips at the top, and cut the clips in the right place.

Performance

We got the application to work on any iPhone with a Bionic chip — that is, iPhone 8 and above. It’s definitely pushing the limits of the device, and especially on these older devices can be a real battery drain.

However the speed of these devices is incredible — you can automatically cut and tag your entire video library in less time than it takes to watch it — about 0.5 seconds for each second of footage on the iPhone X. We haven’t tested it yet on the iPhone 11… but man we cannot wait.

Try it out

You can try it and download it from the App Store right now. Let us know if you have any thoughts and suggestions saku@asteroid.zone.