Microsoft Clipchamp is getting some pretty incredible AI powers

Microsoft Clipchamp’s video editor is one of the company’s best products. AI is one of the company’s top initiatives. So, voila: AI is being added to Clipchamp in three big ways.

Two new features are being added today, to both Personal and Work accounts: background removal and noise suppression. But there’s an enormous new feature due in the fall: video creation via an AI prompt, with video, audio and transitions all selected by AI.

Clipchamp is Microsoft’s “built in” video editor inside of Windows. It’s a Web app, but quite simple and easy to use. It might not have the power of professional tools like Da Vinci Resolve, but neither Paint nor Photos are designed to compete with Adobe Illustrator or Lightroom, either. All three are simply designed for efficiency and ease of use.

You might imagine, too, that the average user would lack professional accessories like a green screen and a nice mic, or might import footage from an outside event where the wind is blowing. The first tool, noise suppression, is designed to take care of that. All you’ll need to do is upload the footage, navigate to the Audio panel, and access the “noise suppression” toggle. Clipchamp will then filter out sounds like the distracting breeze as you filmed your nephew at the park. Alternatively, you can leave the filtering off, and capture the sounds of the waves at the beach as ambient background noise.

Removing a background isn’t all that novel. But for a video, it is. According to Microsoft, you can remove backgrounds from a movie clip. (Microsoft refers to this as removing a background from an “image” in its blog post, and it’s not clear whether you’ll have to do it on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s unlikely, though.) You can then replace the background with another image ore presumably a separate video clip.

Microsoft is also adding a much more interesting feature to Clipchamp, sometime this fall. One of the key features in Clipchamp is its preconfigured templates, for birthday parties or social media, and so on. But they’re all predetermined by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 roadmap shows that you’ll be able to set a template via a prompt, much like generating AI art.

“Clipchamp brings video creation skills to Copilot,” the roadmap says. “Type your prompt and Clipchamp will write a bespoke script, source high quality stock footage, and assemble a video project with music, voiceover, text overlays and transitions. Open your video project draft in the Clipchamp app to continue to edit, export, and share. This feature is great for informational videos, video messaging, how-to videos, demos, and video presentations.”

This feature is scheduled for September, but the timetable isn’t fixed in stone.

Even with AI, you’ll still have to customize your final result with your own video footage, audio, and so on. But it sounds like a lot of the polish will already be applied!