About Kaspar AI
- Founders: Piotr Winiewicz, Mads Damsbo, Esbern Torgard Kaspersen
- Founded in: 2019
- Employees: 5
- Money raised: €300,000 via innovation fund and research grants
- Ultimate goal: To revolutionize the way film and video content is edited
A new video editing system that also works as a personal assistant to edit raw film material? The Danish company Kaspar will soon come out with a tool to help film and television makers. Filmmaker and founder Piotr Wieniwicz talks about it.
What is Kaspar?
“Kaspar is a video editing tool supported by AI. It should help film and television makers find their story faster. At the same time, the program is also a personal assistant that helps with processing large amounts of video data. As an example, to make one hour of footage for a documentary, eighty hours of raw footage must first be viewed. This often takes around sixteen weeks. Kaspar can process this material ten times faster than a human.”
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How did Kaspar come about?
“The way visual material is still processed today is dated. People are often stubborn. New technologies, including AI, don’t really get a chance within the industry, despite the fact that it can be a real solution for the television world where everything must be very fast. We were bothered by the amount of time it takes to edit raw material and figured there had to be a way to make it all go faster. Our team consists of two filmmakers and a technical engineer who knows all about artificial intelligence.”
How does Kaspar work?
“Kaspar analyzes the image and sound material. Coding the material can be done much faster by an AI assistant than by a human. Kasper takes over the boring chores from us, allowing the creator to fully focus on the creative process. We now have a prototype that we are trying out with a few selected customers. Through this we are discovering what still needs to be improved. The prototype works but is not quite ready for the market yet. We hope that Kaspar can be launched in the first quarter of 2022.”
Are there any companies that are already interested in this?
“Yes indeed, we have received grants from film institutes and an innovation fund in Denmark. We were recently in the Netherlands at the Institute for Sound and Vision. We are participating in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Through our participation, we can introduce Kaspar and let filmmakers get used to this new way of video editing. By the way, did you know that a lot of reality TV is made in the Netherlands. That’s a target group that would really benefit from our solution.”
What else is in the pipeline for the future?
“We have some other ideas besides Kaspar, but I don’t want to say anything about that just yet. We first want to focus on the revolution we are going to bring about with Kaspar. And then we might come up with other tools for the TV and film industry. Making a competitive video editing program like Adobe or Avid is not within our ambition.”
Read the previous installments in this series here.
