We’ve all been there. You get a spark of an idea for a project, and suddenly you find yourself staring at 47 open tabs, three different subscription pages, and a sudden urge to completely overhaul your workflow.
Lately, I’ve been deep in the trenches of video editing, audio tweaking, and project management. Instead of trying to code my own custom tools from scratch—because let's face it, there's no need to reinvent the wheel when the current tech landscape is this wild—I'm testing what's already out there.
Here is a look at what I’ve officially adopted, what I'm currently testing, and the massive "to-look-at" list sitting on my desk.
Before jumping into the shiny new toys, here is what is actively keeping my creative life together right now:
While my current stack handles the basics, the video and AI space is moving incredibly fast. I've curated a list of specialized tools I'm breaking down into three distinct buckets: Traditional Web Editors, Heavyweight AI Video, and The Deep Cuts.
Sometimes you just need to cut a video together quickly without waiting on rendering queues or frying your GPU.
This is where things get cinematic. I want to see how far the boundaries of pure generative video can be pushed right now.
This one is an entirely different beast. Manim (the Mathematical Animation Engine originally built by Grant Sanderson for his 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel) isn't a click-and-drag AI tool. It’s a Python library.
If I want stunning, precise, programmatic animations that explain complex technical concepts, I have to code them. It’s going to be a steep learning curve compared to a prompt box, but the visual payoff is unmatched.
The objective here isn't to use all of these tools at once—that’s a recipe for creative burnout and a very expensive credit card bill. The goal is to find the perfect synergy. Imagine organizing a script in Notion, generating a custom mathematical visual in Manim, enhancing the cinematic b-roll via Runway, and tying it all together with crisp audio engineered in Audacity.
The toolkit is out there. Time to go build.
Are you using any of these in your current workflow? Drop a comment and let me know which AI video generator is actually worth the hype, or if I should brace myself for the Manim learning curve!