From Traditional Video Editing to Generative AI Video: A Practitioner's Perspective on Adapting Creative Workflows

Generative video models can now produce short clips from text or images, and commercial creators are using them alongside recorded footage. This paper offers a practitioner perspective on what that change means for working video editors. It argues that generative AI is better understood as a change in the interface through which creative skills are applied than as a simple replacement of editors: the work moves from editing material that someone else captured toward specifying, directing, evaluating and assembling material that a model generates. The paper combines a targeted review of published research, industry reports and regulatory sources with a reflective account of the author's own transition from conventional editing to AI-assisted and AI-generated video production. It describes the practical difficulties of that transition, including inconsistent output, limited control, time spent on unusable generations, and the difficulty of making synthetic footage feel authentic. It also proposes a twelve-step workflow derived from the author's practice and discusses ethical and legal considerations such as disclosure, likeness, copyright and labour displacement. The author's experience is not statistically representative, and no quantitative claims are made from it. The paper is intended to help other working creatives plan their own adaptation and to give future researchers a documented practitioner account to examine, test or challenge.