Alright, Enough With Those “Top 5” Articles: We Got the Best Sports Highlight Video Maker Right Here

Let me start off this one with a simple question — what is the best way to attract more viewers to a particular sport? The sport itself, of course.

And another one: does a not yet committed potential fan have time to watch the entire event to figure out if it’s their thing? I guess not.

So, the highlights, then.

The third question: what sports highlight video maker do you use to make the clips as effectively as possible?

That requires a longer answer.

Why do you need to make sports highlight reels

First things first — let’s elaborate on the notion of highlights’ promotional performance. Why would you want to include making a highlight video for sports into your content strategy?

Think about this:

Highlights get a ton of views

The sporting event is not always about the sport, right? I bet that a lot more people know LeBron James than those who actually keep up with the NBA. So, more people can stumble upon the highlight compilation and watch it out of curiosity just because they recognized the name of the athlete featured in the video.

Another thing is that the short-form of highlight reels is just more approachable. A person not committed to a sport is more likely to watch a three-minute video containing the most exciting moments.

That’s how you get more views on short highlights clips than actual game footage.

Best moments compilations have a long shelf life

Just face the truth: few people re-watch the competitions. They are too long for most people. Who has that kind of time?

But highlights do work great for that.

Some viewers may want to remember the best moments of the games they have witnessed; others might want to catch up on the events they missed. And there might be people who just want to check the sport out, see what’s so great about it.

Athletes, sports leagues and media companies can also benefit from re-using the highlights clips.

For instance, athletes ‌use their own highlights as a portfolio of sorts: the videos showcase their performance and help them land a position in a team. Gotta back up those stats, right?

Sports leagues and media companies can use the clips, as we have already mentioned, to promote the events, the sport as a general, and use it as b-roll in other videos.

Use the highlights footage for promotion

Any type of video content is a good place for promotion. And not only for promoting the sports and events — all kinds of sponsors can get in on that as well.

As it goes, sports fields, stadiums, and uniforms have a ton of logos that promote the sponsor of the event.

Now, you are in charge of what scenes from the game footage make it into the highlight compilation.

So you can make the sponsor you’re partnering with happy — just throw in a banner or two in the highlight video.

With that out of the way, we can start looking at the best approaches to making sports highlight videos.

How to make sports highlight video

You can go about that in two ways:

• Have a third-party contractor do the whole thing for you;
• Cut the highlights yourself. Maybe with a little help.

When it comes to hiring a third-party to make highlight reels, there’s really not much to talk about. You just hand the footage over and…

Wait.

And there’s obviously no way to make the process more effective.

So we will focus on you taking matters into your own hands.

You as a sports highlight video maker

The approach is as bare bones as it gets.

You get the game footage.

You sit in front of the computer.

You watch it all.

You cut the highlights and edit them together.

I bet ‌you can already see the major flaw — the time it takes to do all of that.

Sure, there are ways to speed the manual editing up — you can hire more editors to help you out, and even get scouts on the field to mark the timelines of most important game moments.

But all of that still boils down to a bunch of people spending lots of time in the editing room. Not good.

Web-based sports highlight video makers

In some ways, it is a step up from a traditional video editing process. Mainly because the sports highlight video makers are made specifically for the purpose of compiling the best game moments together.

So they come with handful features like:

• Voice-over;
• Music;
• Filters;
• Graphics;
• Aspect ratio change;
• Logos and watermarks;
• Transitions.

Yes, you can do all of that with Premiere Pro. But the point is that sports highlight video makers are streamlined in order to facilitate the single task to the highest degree.

A sports highlight video maker is the most effective at, well, making sports highlights.

There are no confusing menus and useless features. You just get it, cut your footage, merge the clips, add the logos and transitions you need, and get out.

And would you look at that — we still have some flaws here.

That’s right. You still have to sit there and edit away. Sure, the process is optimized to some extent thanks to more streamlined features of a sports highlight video maker, but during busy seasons you still might lag behind with consistent content production.

And it just so happens that I know a good way to use that pre-recorded video and cut down on the editing time.

AI-powered sports highlight video maker

Here’s what I say: you can get a sports highlight video maker that takes the editing process from manual to automatic completely.

All you would need to do is just feed the footage to the system — it will analyze it, find the moments worth cutting, and put together a compilation of those moments.

“Can AI actually do that?”, you may ask.

Well, it is a question with two answers.

It can find the highlights within the footage and cut them, add pre-set transitions and music, and all of that jazz. The most important rule to keep in mind is that the system can’t pull the solution out of thin air. If you don’t expect it to, it will do just fine.

Here’s what I mean.

The AI has to know what it is looking for. It can’t figure the thing out on its own. Going back to our highlights task, the AI requires some metadata that would help it:

• Certain objects that are in the frame, like the ball going into the basket;
• Audio clues, like the crowd cheering;
• Text clues, like the score changes.

So if the AI finds those things in the footage, then it knows that it’s the right clip.

But here’s another answer: it can’t just look at the footage and contextually analyze it to figure out what it sees. It knows no intensity, no drama, no emotion whatsoever.

So no metadata, non bueno.

Hold on, that does not mean we have to give up on automation at all. We just have to figure out the way to make the machine understand the content.

And we did.

Cognitive computing

If we want the best video editor for sports highlights to understand the content just like the humans do, it only makes sense to look into cognitive function imitation.

So, enter Cognitive Computing technology. We have leveraged complex tools and models that take the sports highlight generation to the next level.

The software does not just see the ball and goes like “that must be important”.

It can actually tell apart the ball rolling through the field from a game-deciding penalty.

Here’s how it does that.

We split the process of footage analysis into three stages, facilitating each with a separate set of technology. Those stages also imitate two separate cognitive features: what the brain “sees”, what it “thinks” of the things it sees, and what it does with them.

Representations stage

To put things in perspective, that part of the process tries to emulate the human eyes. Though Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning algorithms can detect objects in video, we had to make sure that our solution recognizes objects in the harshest conditions.

So, we slapped some more tech on top of that. Here’s the whole setup:

• Deep learning;
• Digital image processing;
• Cognitive computer vision;
• Traditional computer vision.

So we got that portion figured out: our cognitive computing solution can tell apart all kinds of objects it sees in the footage.

Another perk of our system is that it needs no training like regular AI does. The AI algorithm can detect bats and baseball balls just fine, but switch to tennis — and you have to re-train the model.

Cognitive computing allows you to move forward with almost no preparation — it will figure everything out.

Now, what does it do next?

Decisions stage

We arrive at the “brain” imitation part. Here, all the efforts and the technology are aiming at making sense of the footage that the solution has recognized at the first stage.

To make sure that our sports highlight video maker can work in a variety of conditions, we had to make sure that it does not just go “I spy with my little eye something round”, figure it being a ball, and call it a highlight.

We wanted software that can actually recognize high drama moments and intense situations like overtime or high-impact scores.

So, we applied the following solutions:

• Probabilistic AI;
• Cognitive science;
• Machine perception;
• Math modeling.

And that is what makes the best video editor for sports highlights. That is the core of the effective automation that does not spare you the time on editing so you could spend it on training an algorithm or making sure it got everything right.

I’m looking at you, Deep Learning.

Cognitive Computing solution is so good at identifying the highlight-worthy moments that you don’t need to train it or lean over its shoulder and micro-manage the process.

Get the footage of any sports event, it will do the rest.

Chop-chop stage

And now the last part of sports highlight generation — cutting the clips and putting them together into a single video.

The Cognitive Mill™ pipeline has another trick up its sleeve.

You don’t even know what’s coming to you.

And there it is.

The editing process is also completely automated!

You don’t just get the file with metadata on where the best moments of the event are. Cognitive Mill™ goes ahead and cuts them and makes a video for you.

Well, you can manage the transitions, the music, and choose the type of highlight configuration: you can have the sports highlight video maker produce a compilation of a certain athlete performances, players beefing with a referee, and so on.

But you can surely say goodbye to sleepless nights in front of the screen.

And just like anything we discussed here already, our sports highlight video maker is smart about the way it cuts highlights.

Sometimes the highlight itself can be over, but the caster takes a second or two finishing his thought on whatever just happened. The video with the commentary cutting off does sound kind of bad, so we also analyze the audio of the footage to include the commentary.

At the end of the day, you're getting the best moments of the game, with smooth transitions, no commentary cut off, in a single video. And not a finger lifted.

How cool is that?

Bottom line

When it comes to entertaining a bunch of people who are fans of sports or just kinda interested in it, you just can’t go wrong with sports highlights.

Everybody and their mom loves them!

They are short and contain the best moments of the game — that “no nonsense” approach is liked by many.

And whoever you are — an athlete looking to compile your portfolio, or a media company promoting the sport to the widest audience possible — we know you want to make highlights fast.

And you want them to be good as well.

Unfortunately, with all of those sports highlight video makers, you can’t have both. If you want good clips, you have to sit there and edit.

If you want the process to be automated, you will have to monitor the software ‌every time.

But we are here to say that we figured it out.

We have built a sports highlight video maker that is powered by Cognitive Computing tech. Now, the software can actually understand everything going on in the footage and recognize the highlight-worthy moments effectively.

And that’s how it is: you load the footage, then get the highlights, then get on with your life.

If you're looking to implement such a system, drop us a line at support@cognitivemill.com or fill in the form below. We will discuss the details, answer the questions you have, and set up a demo.