u/Gabe_at_Descript

u/vats_the_lekhak - all of this will depend on your space, ambient lighting, and type of camera. It's really hard to give exact numbers. You should find someone who's video lighting you like and try to find more about their setup.

There are lots of angles, lighting styles, brightness levels that will work, but they won't all work for everyone given the variation in how people look, complexion, face shape, etc.

Some tips that might help come to a better answer:
- Your face is clearly visible, and it compares well with a high quality still photo of yourself (if not, brighten your lights)
- Your face isn't washed out (if it is, lower your lights, or reposition them.

And maybe check out this video that our main video guy made about lighting. It's really good, I'm not just saying that because we're colleagues: https://youtu.be/72tg3Dbn4-s

I don't think you'll find something that takes care of everything you listed without any manual intervention at all. But, there are some agent based AI editing tools starting to come online. My company (Descript) has one, which I've been using for quickly creating a rough edit, then I take over for the fine tuning.

I know that Veed, Riverside and some other companies are building something similar. Definitely worth giving them a try, but keep in mind these tools are very new, and still have a lot of growth before they can do a good job on every task you assign it.

You would normally do this in the SRT file if you have one, if you're using auto-generated captions you can go into YouTube studio and edit them manually.

Out of curiosity, I tried to see if I could get Underlord (Descript's AI agent) to generate a list of "stage directions" i.e. timestamps for what is happening on camera at any given moment. It worked decently well, so if your video is on the long side, and you're not totally sure about when each event happens, that could work as a shortcut to get you most of the way there.

More and AI tools are able to interpret visual media so I hope there's a more automated way to do this in the future.

The best utility for AI tools in editing right now is mostly as you described: eliminating busy work, tedious steps, getting your FX settings to be automated etc.

That said, the first wave of agentic AI editing has landed, this is more like an assistant, than a tool that can do an edit for you. The better versions can take almost any action that you could do manually, and do it for you at your request.

This won't get you from 0 to 100 on its own, but it might get you from 0 to 50. I'll often use the Descript version to run a set of commands at the beginning of my edit that eliminate the first 30 or so minutes of normal manual edits I would do: removing retakes, filler words, adding some effects, adding chapters and splitting things into sections (scenes in Descript lingo.)

Even for folks with misgivings about AI, I think there are lots of things most editors agree don't really do much to sharpen their skills and definitely don't require a creative touch. The goal is to have more time to focus on what really matters.

If the ratio of cost to features is your main concern, Resolve makes of a lot of sense.

Descript (and tools like CapCut) tend to be a great choice for people who don't necessarily have time to learn a complex tool, or who want to work with agentic AI tools, automate more, and people who like to edit using a transcript as opposed to a timeline.

Hope you find the tool that works best for you (and doesn't crash.)