The Story of LumaFusion | Terri Chats to 9to5Mac Overtime

also felt like it was important for us to take six months that we were not developing for Corral before we released our own product we did that that was a difficult time because neither of us were making any money at all just nobody knew about it it's just a sea of apps out there I think we were making like $260 a day and and Chris had said to me I can't do this much longer [Music] so we're here with Terry Morgan from Luma touch um obviously you guys know Luma Fusion this is an app that we've talked about for many years she is part of that instrumental Duo to bring us uh Luma fusion and we're honored to have her on the show how are you doing good thanks Jeff thanks for the introduction and thanks for joining us Terry yeah but uh I'm personally excited cuz as I was mentioning in the preall I've been using Luma Fusion since 2018 maybe even 2017 on the original iPad Pro that like big the huge tablet still with the home button MH and honestly Luma Fusion has a big part in my Creator journey and my you know YouTube journey and I was tell Jee I was telling Terry I was kind of doing some simple math I have over 800 videos edited on Luma Fusion on an iPad that's if you if you date back to when I started yeah crazy so this is a beautiful time to kind of talk about it for sure I'm gonna have to go look and see if he surpassed me I'm a little bit envious there mhm yeah which is an awesome thing to see and I've just continue to learn with it it keeps evolving alongside with me there's little tricks and and things that I've been learning along the way with Luma Fusion to kind of expedite my workflow and it's just a beautiful system and it works so well with the iPad and the iPhone and I kind of just want to learn a little bit or we want to learn a little bit about how it came to be what your background is what made you think of luma Fusion to begin with um so kind of take it away Terry and kind of give us the ins and outs of how it all started right well I was working at Avid as well as chrisis who's now the co-founder with me and we had an amazing manager that took eight eight employees aside and said hey I want you to go build something that edits on an iPad um and that was his only the instruction he said six months come back in six months with the product and we came back with Avid studio for iPad and um it was just an amazing experience because in in development prior to working on iOS there was just a there's a lot of lag between a designer saying I want this feature this is how it should look and feel and a developer creating that feature and there's a lot that happens in between those two points and sometimes that leg causes its own kind of problems and when we started on iOS we just were freed from that leg because I mean there was times in development where I would say Chris would say do you like this and I would say no I'd like it this other way and 15 minutes later he says do you like this better you know and I could actually touch and hold the thing that he was creating so we had a great time on that team and then Avid sold uh Avid studio and Avid studio for iPad and the whole team to Correll and uh at that point Carell they weren't really in the business at that time of supporting development they were in the business of just um putting the product out there letting go of the employees and just uh making money from that product I don't know what they're doing now but at that time they you're gone a Avid is just to kind of clarify is that just another company kind of in the same world or oh Avid is AVID media composer like from the 80s on onward they were the top dog of video editing and in some Realms they still are uh they they kind of went into the more high-end news and um big systems um okay work and so now they're they're they're less popular than final cut or whatever but they were totally the thing to use I used them for years and years as a professional editor and Top Dog in audio too with Pro Tool and Pro Tools I mean they did acquire a lot of companies which means they have a huge breadth of knowledge in the industry and frankly I mean I started out at as an editor and then I was hired by light works what they did was they would take a film and they' they'd identify a key the the different frames and Associate those with frames on video video so you could edit your film on video and then have it have the negative cut so this goes way back but they did they did a lot of films back in the day and um so I was working for them and you know I've been bought and sold so many times I can't even tell you and I I've never looked for a job ever in my career that I can remember there was one time when I was working when when F finally light work closed down and I was the last person standing at our little team and my job was just to tell customers they can't have a fix you know that was kind of a sucky job but at the end of that I went to fast multimedia and worked on liquid so so I'm i' I've been around the block in in editing companies but when anyway so when we were sold to Carell Chris and I after a bit of time decided to to um Carell had made Avid studio for for iPad into Pinnacle Studio for iPad they took the Pinnacle brand and we decided to ask them if we could support Pinnacle and develop it um for them just me and him and they said yeah sure that's fine they didn't really care they like you know so that kept us in business long enough to create Luma Fusion which took us three years from uh 2013 to 2 the end of 2016 it took us to build Luma Fusion the first version I have a question like what was it what did that manager at abot se to be because that was a pretty Forward Thinking sort of like was two three years old at that point yeah I mean his name was tongi and he was just an amazing manager for one he he brought our team came from a place of dysfunction to a real working team using agile for development so he put us through agile training and um he's just a forward forward thinking guy and he still is to this day you know he's called the sherpa now and he does the marketing sort of um video and uh newsletter but yeah I think what he saw was that employees when they're happy and when they are left to to be creative that they can bring a different kind of energy to a product than using the traditional method which was called waterfall where someone sits down and writes a whole big 1500 page spec which I did for liquid St liquid or one of those products and um and then you hand it off to the developers and you say you know have fun with that and then the developers are angry they they build things even though they can see they're wrong and you know all this kind of neg negativity happens and tongi is like you know what if I just put a small team together and they each have 100% autonomy to you know impact the product then they will and we did it was just the best experience uh and so here at Luma touch we we run it very much the same all of our employees have no matter what their job is they have just as much right to say I don't like this this isn't working right this happened to me and I I was angry or this interface is ugly whatever they want to say we take that in and respect that um so it's a I think it's a great place to work but I mean you'd have to ask with the [Laughter] employees yeah but we agile so anyone can write a story about what they want and then that story goes into a group meeting where we discuss it and so on eventually gets designed what do you think it does for a company to be freed of that Legacy baggage from like old school you mentioned the waterfall method not having that baggage weighing you down what does that do for a company as a whole what would you say I mean I think what it does is people get excited in the team and they think of ways to make things better so I don't don't have to tell my team go make this better do this better do this do that it's they come to me and say you know I mean fact Amy on our team she said you know what I really love education I always wanted to do education and I want to be working to bring teachers into Luma fusion and all I had to do was say Okay figure out how to do that and off she went to do that and now she's going to all these conferences and really gaining momentum as our education person but I personally um wouldn't have known how to do that like I don't know how to get into teaching and all that education stuff so if I had had to tell her how it I couldn't have I would have just been like I don't know and would have been um just a dud you know and now it's not it's really growing into something so I think the trusting you know you hire people people because you think they're great right you when you hire them you think this person knows what they're doing they have experience they they love editing that's one important thing to me that they have to love editing and um or at least Love video protection in some way so yeah when when you trust that that is there then you can really relax and let them grow the company with you absolutely and I feel like there's a lot of synergies with 9 to5 as well where it's like you kind of we we're each our own little Silo but we all back each other up and just lets us be creative and stuff that's done a great job and same with Jeff honestly just empowering everybody to create what they want to create how they want to create it and like you said you kind of just ask for the okay and then you you run with it at the end of the day and try to build what what you can in the best way possible um but to kind of backtrack a little bit in terms of luma Fusion so you guys you and the team were guided to make the application specifically for the iPad that was Avid studio for iPad and then while we while we developed and maintained that product which became Pinnacle Studio for iPad I know this is confusing Chris and I then built in the background Luma fusion and at the time that we were done we we felt um it was ethically our job to offer it to Corell so we did actually actually called Carell and say we have this product do you want it and they said no thankfully yes yeah right we'll take it also felt like it was important for us to take six months that we were not developing for Corral before we released our own product just because you know you have to keep these things separate so we did that that was a difficult time because neither of us were making any money at all and then the first six month um it came out um and just nobody knew about it it's just a sea of apps out there and about 6 months in we were at um what's that show in it was in um it's the one for YouTubers and stuff I can't remember it's a consumer show and we were at that show and we were making I think we were making like $260 a day and and Chris had said to me I can't do this much longer we just went six months without income and this is going nowhere and Jeff Benjamin wrote an article about Luma fusion and put us on the map and I owe everything to Jeff's article and to Jeff because honestly it just it just went up to a level and never went down down and it was all due to that article and so for me 9 to5 Mac and and Jeff are the are keys to what it's it's almost it's a it's a magic and it's a luck but it also you know there's things that happen that you have to be thankful for and that was one thing that like if it hadn't have happened we wouldn't be here and I'm Sor I'm really thankful that Jeff I don't know about that but like I feel flowers yeah thank you appre appreciate it really um but at the same time you were prepared right like it'd be one thing if I wrote the article and it wasn't that great of an app yes um and then it would have been like you know that's true but because it was a good app you you were there's a saying like stay ready so you don't have to get ready right so you guys were ready um and just it was just that point in time that intersection that caused it yes and and but it's just that if you had hadn't have shown up that we were we were looking at one or two more weeks before we were done you know it just like we're done we ched on this we worked for four years with no pay and our families can't sustain it any longer you know so you came along and I was like oh thank God this is so I might not even be here if it wasn't for that article honestly right that's amazing yeah um just a kind of paint the picture a little bit at that time I'm assuming you said 20 late 2016 early 2017 what other competitors were out there for the iPad at that point nothing I mean imov but there was nothing that you could professionally edit with so we were the first professional editors or editor for iPad and iPhone and probably are the still the only professional editor for iPhone um and now we're on Android and Chromebook and um you know silicone Mac so we have expanded but at the time there was just nothing now of course there's Da Vinci and and Apple has come out with their own version MH of I just remember like desperately looking for an editor for the iPad just and I found Pinnacle so I was using Pinnacle Studio for a while but it's that's Luma Fusion was in a whole different League yeah when they came out so it was just like mindblowing that we had this app that was so capable this editor that was so capable on the iPad I mean pennacle Studio was Chris and I's work with our team there at Avid and it was built on code that we ported a lot of it was ported over from the desktop so there was big chunks of code that were just they weren't ideal for for iOS but they were working and it put a lot of limitations into what we could do like we were just stuck in a framework that wasn't going to change um without a lot of work so when we built Luma Fusion Chris made sure that we use always the latest uh Frameworks and Foundations from Apple so that when Apple gets an upgrade we we get an upgade grade for practically free I mean we do have to make sure things work and maybe change something maybe add a little feature here or there but that is our uh and and now we we did take a long time to come out with speed ramping and enhanced key framing which is in version five as an as an inapp purchase but part of the reason was because Luma fusions code is is now well you know over 10 years old parts of it were so we had to refactor that to keep up with so that we can continue to add features for the future so refactoring is basically rewriting big chunks of code and with that can come bugs and things that you thought you fixed five times and they're back again and so there's a lot of testing to be done and now Luma Fusion is really ready for the next things we have planned no that's beautiful and I remember back then I think like I said it was late 2017 when I found Luma fusion and what Drew me to it was yes it was that professional video editor for the IP ad but I think it was I was so impressed with how well it worked from both a real time perspective like being able to render things in real time compared to what I had I think I had a MacBook Air at that time and I was running Final Cup Pro on it and of course the MacBook Air couldn't really handle what I was doing so it would freeze up all the time and it was just I I couldn't believe how much smoother it was on the iPad and I think that's what made me realize uh that's what started my love for the iPad as well cuz like oh this machine is a lot more powerful than most people think it is and I'm sure when you were first before Jeff's article part of it was that people didn't realize what the iPad can do back then and how powerful it really was and what Apple was doing so I'm sure that really opened up the door to a lot of people like myself having the iPad as a computer replacement because you know it was the MacBook Air was choking the Final Cup Pro and then here I was with Luma Fusion exporting things in real time on on a tablet you know and I I thought that was amazing back in the day yeah yeah it I and I think probably the same holds true for Apple so when they came out with iPad and iOS it was all new like they could do mhm a fresh a fresh look at the world and and do do better things so I do want to talk about now Luma Fusion 5.0 because as you mentioned it was released about three four weeks ago I've been using it I've been testing it I absolutely love it the speed ramping I use it all the time now which is awesome and even the the default like pre-installed ones that are just easy to use um it's been amazing so I mean talk to us a little bit about 5.0 what got you guys to this point what made you bring those new features in you know elaborate on it a little bit speed ramping is the top requested feature over the life of luma Fusion so I Works flawlessly by the way thank you we we had to do it uh in that in that sense because we do like like to listen to our customers and and you know what what they ask for we try our hardest to to give um but I did I didn't want to you know you could do speed ramping in a lot of different ways but I wanted to have the advanced or enhanced key framing done so that because enhanced key framing gives us two things it gives us the the paths and the curves which have nothing to do with speed ramping but also it gives the easing so that is how fast you're changing from one thing to another on any parameter including speed and there's a lot of different ways to do that too you could just have a little menu that says ease in or slow in fast out you know whatever but we all felt like that when you develop for an iPad little menus popping up to to realize something is just not the style it's not what we like to do yeah yeah I agree yeah like you can't control it because it's just one speed but also it's just hard to visualize so we created this whole graph that you can see the ease in and ease out it's all colorcoded so if you move the purple slider you can see where on your on your clip is the purple area which is the in ingoing to the key frame and then green is the outgoing so we have it all colorcoded you can see exactly what's happening nothing ever weird happens and so um people think sometimes oh speed r was it's so easy why didn't you just put it in it's like but it even one person said we should just copy from someone else I said but there's nobody to copy like this on mobile having this level control doesn't exist until now so who who would I copy I mean honestly I would copy someone if they had a really great thing but there's usually when you're going for professional features on mobile no good example out there so and also I don't like to copy because honestly um I do this job because I love it and I don't I wouldn't get a lot of um joy out of that so I I just tend not to want to do that and yeah along with the uh the speed ramping that's a feature that I use all the time on desktop and to have that so easy to do in Luma Fusion is a nice nice addition yeah I think um before you know we had to freeze the whole entire composition of many layers as one thing and I I hadn't even realized myself how much more powerful it would be just to freeze the background or just freeze this layer or freeze you know it just really helps a lot so yeah I do like that we also have adjustable um adjust added an adjustable UI to the effects editors we've added grids and guides so you can move um and you can move a horizon line so you can line things up um um we have new transitions we have left and right hand editing in the effects editor now so you can switch the preview to the other side and um one of my favorites is um the um what's happening panel yeah I like that one too actually yeah yeah you get to kind of all be on the same page so we released the key framing the enhanced key Framing and speed ramping and before you buy it you see the opportunity to buy it in there but once you buy it you immediately get the exact tutorials you need to um be a master at those features so that's cool and then talk to me because you mentioned buying these as a as an add-on and I feel like Luma Fusion is one of the final remaining you know apps and companies that hasn't gone to the subscription model so which I love thank thank you by the way thank you um so talk to me a little bit about that decision because I'm sure it's very easy to be like you know what let's just charge people5 10 $20 a month and have that recurring Revenue versus the onetime purchase so what what kind of came to that decision there's no doubt that we would make more money doing um a subscription it's just the way it is and uh the truth is that monthly subscriptions even though they're cheaper make more than yearly subscriptions and the the literally the only reason that would be is because people forget to cancel their monthly subscription so mhm I editing for me and I'll talk about this more later is just a joy I I can do it for 15 hours and feel like I just woke up you know I'm just like I love it I have fun with it it's like tabletop puzzle I love it and but I don't do it every day um maybe a lot of people edit every couple months or maybe every 3 months and if they have to pay a subscription every month for something they're not using it's just going to create this kind of negative vibe on on this very creative and fun process like if I had to subscribe to a puzzle tabletop puzzle and then I didn't do it for two months I would be like ah this making me feel so guilty I need to do that puzzle it becomes work right so um I just think it's not the whole the gym situation sign up for a gym to make you to make you go to the gym right and then feel guilty every month right that you don't do but I think that there are things that are great for subscriptions things that are Services where the company is constantly um monitoring the world making sure you're getting you know the best security or the best something and things that add constant content in like the subscription to story blocks we pay story blocks a subscription to use their they're a library and we do pass that subscription on to our our customers because otherwise we couldn't have it um but that's constantly new content that that you get to so those are great for subscriptions but not editing no I I I'm against it no and I I I appreciate that because like I said I've been using it for six years and yes there I've been a couple add-ons but the main purchase was one a one time six-year purchase you know and I've been using this in again Luma Fusion it's my career so it's made me way more than what I've spent it's probably the greatest return on investment I've ever had thank you that's wonderful to hear I mean I think that um not everybody will need speed ramping not everybody needs multicam for sure MH so and not everybody needs XML so these are kind of like all theart things yeah if you need it then please pay us for it because we we do need to maintain our company and stay in business but um we don't don't we don't want people that never use multicam to have to pay for that multicam so how do you go about balancing that that thought process like the ethical part of it because like you were talking about you know just your interactions with um Corell and you know the ethics behind that and then when it comes to uh subscriptions and the ethics behind that how do you balance that with like making sure that your company stays profitable obviously you don't have like shareholders and and things like that that are peering over your shoulder yeah wanting you to generate as much revenue as possible so that's a benefit but where's where do you draw the line or where's that how do you generate that balance well I mean that that's a really good question I think it it is because Chris and I are we we founded the company with no investment it was you know bootstrapped and we can make our own decisions and both of us are not people that really desire to be you know Mega wealthy we just want to have like for us we're we're both older um I don't want to say how old I am but I am older so like for me it's all about the joy of um just running the business and working with the people and being being creative and um when that's gone I I'm gone that's it when I when it's not enjoyable anymore I'm done and I think that um therefore I can make decisions that if we're able to keep the team afloat and we're able to have fun then I don't need to gouge people for for something and in the fact that you're like accessible like even at like NAB and other conferences like you're there on the floor whereas you know not every yeah CEO or code founder would be there on the showroom floor mingling with the people so that's the most fun yeah yeah no we just love it we we we it's my community I I have always worked in video I've always been a video editor and um you know it it does bring me to this topic of AI which um I don't know if you want to discuss that sometime but anyway yeah the love of Storytelling and the love of the community and the love of what we do is core for us and um I think that often times I see that threatened by different by different things you know just uh large companies swooping in and trying to make a buck and they do or you know there's stuff with AI that really um bothers me so yeah I I think it's easy to to balance I should say Jeff it's just easy because I just don't I don't have a separate goal U my only goal is to be happy so that's awesome I did want to ask a little bit about because now we've gone six seven years and the landscape has changed a little bit in terms of competition in the mobile editing space of course we mentioned Final Cup Pro came to the iPad which I tried and of course I'm still using Luma Fusion but then there's also the da Vinci of the world and then even even more mobile first more mobile Focus editors like the cap cuts and stuff like that so got his privacy policy insane yeah je so kind of want to know your thoughts on all that you know okay I'll start with the da Vinci and Final Cut I mean obviously when you when you do something you can't expect to be the only people if it's good someone else is going to do it and um I suppose in the perfect Democratic world it would be like oh now we have competition and we're going to do even better but we are doing our best that is it we're doing our best and if that doesn't take us to the end then that that will be the answer right but um we we we were never resting on our Laurels so having competition come along can't do much more to us you know we just keep going and honestly I'm kind of proud that they didn't succeed in putting us out of business you know like we're Rock and yeah I think that most companies that are faced with a very competitive product uh from the mother Apple you know would go out of business and they do all the time you know uh lots of people have been sherlocked and gone straight out of business and and um we we saw it happened and we felt it and but it's not it didn't it didn't do a in so that's amazing and then what is your relationship with apple because I've noticed uh probably in like 2021 2022 Luma Fusion was in the Keynotes like I saw them on the pro display xdr use use with the iPad but then like did you know Apple was coming out with the Final Cup Pro did they give you notice did they work with you guys at all yeah we knew that they would due to a you know they didn't actually tell us they were but they kind of warned us at at one point um and um and it and but that was almost five years before it happened so we kind of like okay well have fun with that you know what are we supposed to do about it nothing so like um we kind of knew it was on the horizon someday and uh and but we also knew that there's nothing that can replace a team that is so passionate about what we're doing that every single person on the team edits and thinks about whether it was a joyful experience and it's just really hard to reproduce that kind of passion in a large company and I've been in many so I I know that is true um so we were also kind of confident that we would be fine yeah and even if the ones in that company are like I'm sure there's plenty of passionate people in apple but they don't have the ability to Pivot and move as quickly as a company like Luma Fusion which has much more flexibility U to be able to like put out releases like 5.0 where you have a whole bunch of big changes in One release whereas it's more of a trickle when you're a bigger company yeah I mean yeah when I was at Avid there would be I'd have my feature list and I'd present it to the uppers and um they would say you know well here your deadline if you don't have it by that you're taking out these five things you know and that and and I would just it's heartbreaking because that sometimes the features are so entwined that you're like well I can't I don't want that without this thing but you know the deadlines the deadlines the you it was crazy um and always pitching always pitching for up to the uppers about what you're going to do and almost it's not like you're lying but you're it's such a pitch because you really you are passionate as an individual but you have to convince um eight people who are not passionate about it to to put the money there and uh that that ruins the process and then that energy that you expend on that like that could have been put into the creative process oh I was way more stressed at at Aid than I am you know H having a whole company to deal with now I'm I'm not stressed over the company at all so you can hear it any your voice which is nice yeah things are just working so cap cut so Jeff you mentioned the privacy policy but I think this is a really good segue to AI because so I started my AI kind of Deep dive in at the end of 2023 and um by NAB I had be I had been watching like Mo gdat and reading um Mustafa sulliman and other Founders in Ai and realize that um many of them are scared to death like they are just like uhoh we've released the Kraken you know and what are we going to you know and here's the thing what what what just gets me about AI is that the me media industry is not and should not be the real Target of ai ai should be used for really important things like saving the Earth doing Health improvements you know Sal curing cancer Alzheimer's all these things but we are the test bed for how AI behaves and even the founders of you know the CEO at open Ai and and the founder of Deep Mind all these people will tell you they don't know how it behaves because they don't know exactly why it works they know that if you throw loads of data with a neural network um together with a lot of computing power those things add up to some amazing things and um so a safe place to for them to unleash it is in the media uh world and they didn't they didn't think about the impact it could have to be able to put anybody's face on any moving body or anybody's voice on anybody's head or or to make a video do anything in any place you want what are the safety precautions here so ironically unleashing that into our industry and at the same time not having any safety protocols and at the same time having stolen or scraped all of the media that we've ever created and still continue to create to do that is just a mindblowing irritation for me I'm just like I cannot what other product in the world can come out and have no safety precautions and no care whatsoever and steal from other from a whole industry mhm and just say oh well it was just research and so we're not productizing it it was just research and we did it and so now we put it out into the world for other companies to productize and monetize but wait you put our stuff out for other companies to productize and monetize what what is going on here like yeah why are we not as an industry saying stop this is not okay and and because this has all happened I know we at first I was thinking of AI like it's a a feature oh great we're going to get this feature we're get background removal we're going to get new you know voiceovers we're going to get these features but this is not a feature this is a complete displacement of VoiceOver artists musicians editors cameramen people that make stop stock images everything that you think is part of of our industry is replaceable with this technology and and it's not even it's not even like Photoshop comes out and all the photographers are like oh no I'm going to lose my job no they just learned how to manipulate Photoshop and they had a new tool and they had new features AI is different it's not a new tool it is someone to do our jobs like there's a there's a thing in in there's a rule of logic that says if proposition is Proposition if p is p then you know it is what it is is what it means and if we ask AI to do all of our creative tasks for our whole industry then guess what AI will do all of our creative tax for our whole industry and we don't have jobs like everything starts with the story it literally does if if if you have a product idea guess what you do first thing you say hey I have an idea here's how it's going to work and you tell a story about that product that you want to build and that's what's at risk here this is really really an issue we should all be thinking about and what is our response to that issue my response as a business owner who makes a product that people use to be creative is to say I will not allow my product to have anything in it that replaces creativity that was built on Stolen data or that will share someone's data with someone else that's my St that's my stance we definitely appreciate that perspective because when you do describe it that way it's it's easy to see like you it's easy to get blinded by the features right because it does kind of help your flow it makes you a little bit more efficient some of the stuff works well it helps with bouncing off ideas for ideation but if you do Zoom out like you said take a more macro approach to it it it could be a little doomsday for sure when you're being creative you have a responsibility or at least a choice to use your own experiences your own mind your own thinking to come up with something that is Uniquely Yours so creativity is when you can take from multiple things in your life that you've seen read or heard and combine them in different ways that are unusual or that haven't haven't been combined that way before of course they haven't because they're yours right so that's how we get these heartfelt true stories from people and true ways of looking at things you have a choice not to use AI to do those creative tasks that creative storytelling that you know I'm I'm all for AI that you know does something that's really I'm incapable of I've I've always been bad at say um cleaning up audio voice like I know where the frequency is but I'm you know so for instance in Luma Fusion we have the voice isolation that is fine I mean there's probably a few people that are like that's my passion I love doing that but but I don't think it's going to have an impact on society if we if we use voice isolation so that and that's machine learning it's on device it's not it's not trained with any AI that was um scraped from the internet so like I think that kind of AI is great and it's appropriate for our industry the kind of AI that um is being Unleashed is more appropriate for bigger problems that no one knows how to solve we we know how to be creative right we just need to do it and that's it knowing that there are tools out there where you can just say hey I want a song that sounds like this at this beat per minute with these types of instruments in it it kind of dampens your I guess um drive because like why am I even who how are they going to determine if my creation is original versus something that someone made in five like it it diminishes the value I guess of what the time and effort that I went into actually make making this making the music playing the guitar playing the drums right like if someone can just do that with a command it just it there's less motivation on my end to want to perfect my craft so to speak and get better at it because it's kind of devalued it's like why am I going to put so much effort into learning how to to make this song when I can just throw it in here from some some AI music web page it's like all the time that I spend known that and that's that goes back to another thing it's like there's creators out there but there are people that aren't really creators they they just make stuff and their motivation is something else like they're just making stuff because it it's a means to an end it's not because or whatever yeah yeah so I don't know there's just so it's so nuanced there's so many different like little areas that you can go into with but you're already feeling it Jeff like you're feeling the impact of something that really just came onto the scene this year in a in a real way that we could use and um and I think that ultimately I could see a a a thing that I like to call um a human only platform you know like a and I call it a hop right I can see this hop where where it's only you know only verified human only made stuff and that creators could have a a life in there and and do really cool things um but I don't see how to get from where we are today where there's a mass of people making quick and dirty um but very slick looking AI stuff and outputting it really fast to a place where there's a a plat form for people who are really creating I see how it could happen but I don't see the mar I don't see the market I don't see how we monetize that kind of creation and that's what scares me like would I tell my child to grow up and be a graphic artist a voiceover artist a video editor a a cameraman no like I would say yeah let's think of something else because that's not going to make you any money and so I feel like I was kind of in this sweet spot my career has been in a sweet spot where you could totally get out of high school or college or whatever and actually make a living creating videos and editing videos and doing all that stuff and and then you know I'm close to retirement age so I I had the sweet spot but I I feel this fear for younger people coming into the industry that there's just not a path from where we are to this other Utopia where there's human only platforms so with with all this being said and you know your opinion on the AI world is there is there a situation where there are I guess I'm going to lean more towards tools right tools into Luma Fusion similar to The Voice isolation features that you guys have um where you bring in a little bit more you know maybe like you said removing backgrounds making things a little bit quicker a little easier again not replacing creativity just helping us be creative I guess I mean yeah is there a world where that that's okay yeah of course there is I mean AI itself isn't evil it's just how we choose to um implement it and and and and where the data came from and does it take away from our creativity and that is subjective that's just like I'm here I'm going to decide because it's my company so I can like you know I want to say because well there was a moment when someone said to me well surely we could just have it do a rough cut with AI and then you can just trim the stuff and I said no because when I'm when I'm editing sometimes my best ideas come from looking through my footage and saying oh my gosh that image would go so perfect with that what that person said and I wouldn't if if I don't spend the time to look through my own media and make those connections which is creativity then then it won't happen and then I then I've you know it's it's ridiculous but yes I've lost a core piece of creative storytelling and so I really think about uh things in that way is this going to diminish as Jeff said the The Joy or the the motivation for doing my project or does it help me along it's just like okay I really really want this thing to happen and I know I could just press a button and then I can move on with my story like a background removal yeah let's do it and I guess my final question you know since we are in the Apple world what what is your take on how apple is implementing Apple intelligence you know is there room for that to be integrated into Luma Fusion are you guys working around it at all is it in discussion what does that look like to you well Chris looks very carefully at what you know how things how the sausage is made so mhm my role is um more of the video editor sort of product manager kind of designer role and so I would say that when it comes to looking at how the sausage made Chris will will determine whether there's anything that's unethical or or that and he and he'll present that to me he'll say um hey I'd like to do the speech and I'm like I I'll say that's going to impede on what I think is the joy of editing and and then we'll have a discussion about it but we have we haven't we haven't had that discussion yet so well Luma Fusion is doing amazing um 5.0 is amazing been playing around with it is there any thing in the future that we can expect from Luma Fusion not necessarily AI related but like a big I won't say low hanging fruit but something that um I guess what are your customers wanting next because obviously we talked about the um the speed ramping but what is the next big thing if you can talk about I don't even well I mean there are a number of you know as the the minute we put out speed ramping may be one of the first com com ments on on YouTube was well what about masking know like but but you know there we do have uh things coming some of them are you know when you're developing you have to you have to look at what apple is doing and and does it make sense for us to develop something or wait six months because we have a feeling they're doing something or something or other so um but we one thing that we did do with refactoring the code is make it possible for us to Pivot quickly move quickly and and output features more regularly than we have been in the past and I on my end have been looking at the entire Creator workflow um beyond the edit what happens before the edit what happens after the edit to try to find um ways that we can expand our sort of ethos into those areas and that ethos being intuitive creative um empowering um workflows and so we're we're hot and heavy on a lot of things but I can't I can't really say what they are yet because we always get in trouble when we do that thank you so much for joining us Terry it's been an amazing chitchat with you um we're happy to see you Luma Fusion still doing so well um and we we're confident it will continue to do so as well thank you you I really appreciate you two having me on and uh of course hopefully we'll see you again yes absolutely and we'll uh we'll link all the information down below how to get it uh the links your information as well and uh if you guys are looking for a video editor and you made it this far into the interview definitely check out Luma Fusion cuz you won't be disappointed yeah if you made it this far this far yeah n [Music]