The Two Ums Standing Between You and Your Truck-Cab Video
Revised October 23, 2026
Is AI replacing video editors?
It is replacing the chores, not the editor. Tools now transcribe your footage, cut the filler words and retakes, and add captions, the work an editor bills by the hour. St. Louis editors average $34.76 an hour, and the judgment about what to keep still comes from a person. Proofread every caption yourself.
Keep reading ↓Two ums are why the video is still on your phone. Forty seconds of you in the truck cab on Gravois, wipers going, explaining the one thing every customer asks. One take. You heard yourself say “um” twice before the good part, locked the screen, and went to bed.
It isn’t the filming that stops you. It’s the next step, the editing, which arrives as a quote that looks like a car payment for something that was supposed to be free advertising. The federal wage data on O*NET puts the average film and video editor in the St. Louis metro at $34.76 an hour, with the top tenth at $46.36 or more. That is a fair wage for a person with taste. The trouble is how an hourly quote bundles taste and chores into one number: the listening for ums, the trimming of dead air, the typing out of what you said so there can be captions. What would you post this week if the chores took a lunch break?
Those chores are the ones the software does now. In Descript you edit the video by editing a doc, and its filler-word tool highlights the ums for you. Its pricing page lists a tool that cuts all but your best takes and another that takes out the digressions and “all the obvious cuts.” In CapCut you open Text, choose Auto captions, press Generate, and synchronized captions appear under your face. None of it decides what is worth saying to a stranger in forty seconds, and that part was always the one nobody could hand off. Pay people for taste. Let the software do the typing.
So the real question isn’t whether AI can replace a person. It’s which hours were taste and which were chores. The shortest version of the answer: film one take, let a transcript editor cut the ums, generate captions, read them for the names only you know, and post.
Is AI replacing video editors?
It is replacing the chores, not the editor. Say the chores on one short video run two hours. At the St. Louis average that is about $70 if you pay for them, and four videos a month is about $280 of work a tool can do while you eat lunch. What stays human is the judgment: which story to open with, where the pause earns its place, which of your takes has your actual face in it. A paid editor with taste is worth the money. The thing to unbundle is the quote, not the person.
If you do hire help, try a different question: which of these hours are taste, and which are chores? A good editor will answer that straight, and may be glad to hand the chores to a tool. The honest answers include color, sound, motion graphics and a second camera, none of which a transcript editor does.
There is also a chair in this town that most owners walk past. The St. Louis Public Library’s Creative Experience runs at Barr, 1701 South Jefferson Avenue, at Central, 1301 Olive Street, and at Julia Davis, 4415 Natural Bridge Avenue. All you need to reserve a computer or recording room is a valid library card. The workstations are walk-in, except during special programs, and the reservations run two hours. The software list includes Adobe Premiere Pro, and the library says Creative Experience offers free workshops on the software and hardware in the space, plus one-on-one help if you sign up for a Tech Connect. That is the hands-on timeline, not the transcript trick, so use it for the finish: let a tool do the transcript and captions at home, then bring the clip in to fix the one cut that bugs you. To schedule a tour, call 314-539-0341, and ask what is installed today.
And when what you want is a brand film, with three cameras, music that is cleared, and a drone shot of the building, hire the person. The honest line runs between a clip that explains and a film that sells. AI is good at the first and shy of the second.
Which tool does which chore?
Say it is late and the clip is open in a transcript editor, the ums lit up and one click from gone. That is Descript, which shows you the clip as a document. Its pricing page says editing video there is as easy as using docs and slides, and the filler-word tool is described as highlighting the “um,” “ah” and “like” so you can remove them in one pass. The free plan comes with limits, though. It gives you 60 minutes of media a month and 100 AI credits as a one-time gift, not a monthly refill, and the filler-word and retake tools are marked limited. That is enough to finish a first video. It is not yet a workflow.
For captions, CapCut offers a download its page says needs no credit card, and says it converts video to text free of charge. Then comes the step that matters: editing the text “to ensure accuracy,” with your own eyes, line by line. YouTube also creates automatic captions for videos you upload, as its help page describes.
For a full editing suite, DaVinci Resolve has a free version that, per Blackmagic Design, handles Ultra HD at up to 60 frames a second. The catch is that text-based editing and the AI Neural Engine are listed under the paid Studio version, which Blackmagic sells for $236 on its page. Free gets you a real suite. It does not get you the transcript trick.
Which one first? Pick by the chore that annoys you most. If it is the transcript and the ums, start with Descript. If it is the captions, CapCut or YouTube will do it. If you want a full suite and do not mind a week of learning, Resolve is the one to grow into. You do not need all three. You need one that makes the first video easy enough to actually finish.
Where does ChatGPT fit?
Not as the editor. OpenAI’s upload page says ChatGPT works with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images and audio files you attach, and that WebM and MP4 files identified as video are not supported by its audio uploads. Audio uploads are limited to paid plans, not the Free plan. So you cannot drop the truck-cab clip into a chat and say “cut this.” What it can do, if you pull the audio out first, is transcribe it on a paid plan, though OpenAI warns that transcripts may contain errors and speaker identification may be unreliable. It is also good at the words around the video: the caption, the post, the description. That is the better use of the tool you may already pay for.
Try it on the words. Paste the transcript of your clip and ask for three title options that sound like something you would say out loud, a two-sentence description, and a caption for each place you post. Then do what you would do to any hire’s first draft: cross out the adjectives you would never use and keep the line that sounds like you on a good day.
Before you add another subscription, see what AI really costs a small business.
Your first video, start to finish
- Film one honest answer to a question a real customer asked you this month. One take is fine.
- Load it into an editor that works from a transcript. On Descript’s free plan that is 60 media minutes a month, plenty for a first try.
- Delete the weak sentences from the text. If your plan has the filler-word tool, use it. If not, read the transcript and cut the ums by hand.
- Generate the captions, then proofread them against your own voice, names first.
- Watch it once on your phone with the sound off. If the captions carry it, it is ready.
- Post it where your customers look, and keep the original file.
The first one will eat an afternoon, and you will wince at your own voice on playback. Everybody does. The third one posts the same day you shoot it, and the one after that you will film standing in a parking lot. That is the whole shift: the video stops waiting on someone else’s calendar.
What can AI still not do for your video?
Press play with the sound off and watch for the caption that spells your own street wrong. That is the first thing AI cannot do: hear a St. Louis voice perfectly. YouTube’s help page is blunt that its automatic captions might misrepresent what was said because of mispronunciations, accents, dialects or background noise, and that you should always review them and edit what is wrong. A truck cab with the heater running is background noise. Your street, your last name, Gravois, Chouteau, Meramec: those are the words to check by eye before anything posts. A caption that mangles your own name is the one the customer remembers.
One habit before you upload anything: look at what is in the frame. A customer’s face, a license plate, a mail pile on a counter with an address showing. Treat an upload to any online editor as if you were posting it. If the frame has someone else’s private life in it, reshoot or crop before the file leaves your phone.
It also cannot film your shop. No tool turns the footage you do not have into footage you do. It cannot tell that the story in the middle is the one your customers actually need, and it cannot know that the take with the dog barking is the one that sounds like you. And anything that invents a presenter, which is a different product from editing, trades the one thing a local business sells, a real person you can call, for something polished that nobody will believe.
Who owns a video when AI helped make it?
You do, when it is your footage. The U.S. Copyright Office reported that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation, or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-made work, does not bar copyright. It also concluded that outputs of generative AI can be protected only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements, and not by the mere provision of prompts. Read that twice. A clip a text prompt invents may not be something you can fully claim. The face and voice on your phone, trimmed and captioned by a tool, are yours.
That is the quiet argument for keeping the camera on yourself. The person on screen is the asset the competition cannot copy and, as it turns out, the one the law is surest belongs to you.
Where does the finished video go?
Everywhere you can put it, because one platform is one thin thread. People search for answers, not websites, and a clip that answers the question your customers ask is what a neighbor, Google or an AI turns up when it goes looking. Post it to YouTube, put it on Facebook, and add it to your listing on St Louis Near Me Directory, where a video on a listing can be indexed as its own page. A caterer filming in a Soulard kitchen between orders, a roofer on a ladder in Tower Grove: the clip has the same shape. If you can post to Google or Facebook, you can post here. Same effort, and it adds up.
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If you’re the owner whose best video is still on your phone, the customers searching for what you do are watching someone else’s. List your business on St Louis Near Me Directory to get more customers while you learn, or see who AI names instead of you.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI really edit videos?
Yes, for the mechanical work. Tools can transcribe your footage, let you cut by deleting words, remove filler words and retakes, and add captions. They do not decide what story is worth telling, and captions still need a human read. Think of AI as the assistant who does the tedious part so you can do the part that needs you.
Can AI make a video for my business?
Some tools generate video from a text prompt. Descript lists a generate-video tool, though it is limited on the free plan. For a local service business, a generated presenter is a poor trade, because customers choose you for being a real person. Filming yourself and letting AI clean it up keeps the trust and costs less.
Can ChatGPT edit videos for you?
Not directly. OpenAI’s upload page lists documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images and audio, and says video files are not supported by audio uploads. ChatGPT can help with the words around a video, such as a script, caption or post, and can transcribe audio on a paid plan. For the cutting itself, use a video editor.
Which AI can edit a video for free?
Descript has a free plan with text-based editing and 60 media minutes a month, though its AI tools are limited there. CapCut says its caption generator is free of charge, and DaVinci Resolve has a free version, though text-based editing sits in the paid Studio edition. Start free with one of them before you pay.
How can I edit a video?
Film one honest answer to a real customer question. Load it into an editor with transcript editing, delete the weak sentences from the text, then generate captions and proofread them. Trim to the length the platform rewards and export. Keep it short, and post it everywhere you have a doorway.
Are AI generated videos copyright free?
Not in the sense of being yours to protect. The U.S. Copyright Office says generative AI outputs are protected by copyright only where a human author determined sufficient expressive elements, and not by prompts alone. Using AI to assist while a person makes the work does not bar copyright, so your own footage stays yours.
Do AI-edited videos look fake?
Not when it is real footage of you. The face and voice are yours, and the tool only trims and captions them. The fake look belongs to generated presenters. Keep your own face, review the captions, and the video will sound like the person your customers already trust.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.