`I run a small creative agency, four people, about fifteen video projects a month. Most of it is short-form social content and product spots for DTC brands. Standard work, nothing exotic, but the volume is real and growing.
Last quarter, our Premiere Pro workflow was quietly destroying us. Not because Premiere is a bad product (it's genuinely excellent), but because the pipeline around it had become absurdly heavy. Footage sourcing happened in stock libraries and Runway. Music licensing happened in Epidemic Sound. Script drafts came from ChatGPT. Captions went through CapCut. Assembly happened in Premiere. Export went through Media Encoder. Six tools for one video, with file downloads and uploads and format compatibility troubleshooting at every handoff.
I set aside two weeks to test alternatives. The goal was simple: find something that could compress that pipeline for our simpler, from-scratch projects.
The test
Same project across every tool: a 30-second product ad for a fictional skincare brand. I wrote the brief once and adapted it to each tool's input format. I tracked three things: total time from start to export, credit/cost consumption, and how much manual work was needed after the AI did its thing.
What I actually found, tool by tool
Runway generated gorgeous clips. Four out of five were usable without any modification, and the visual quality was noticeably ahead of every other generator I tested. But Runway gave me five clips and nothing else. No script, no assembly, no audio. I still had to take those clips to Premiere, find music from a library, write captions, and assemble the edit manually. Total time: 15 minutes in Runway plus 40 minutes in Premiere, so 55 minutes. About $4 in credits. Runway is a clip factory, not a video factory, which is fine if you have a dedicated editor downstream but doesn't solve the pipeline problem.
Descript was amazing for the wrong project. I imported some test interview footage separately and had a solid rough cut in ten minutes, the transcript-based editing is genuinely that fast for talking-head content. But for the product ad test, Descript couldn't help at all because there was no footage to edit. It's an editing tool and a very good one, but it assumes the raw material already exists.
CapCut was fast. Templates sped everything up, auto-captions worked well, and I had a finished video in about 25 minutes. The problem was that the output looked exactly like a CapCut template video. If you've scrolled through TikTok for more than ten minutes, you've seen the aesthetic. For some brands that's completely fine. For brands that want to look distinctive, the template-driven approach becomes a ceiling pretty quickly.
InVideo was template-based with an AI script generator that produced a reasonable first draft from my brief. Functional output in about 30 minutes, but the customization options were limited enough that the final video felt generic in a way that would be hard to present to a client with a straight face.
Pictory did text-to-video with stock footage. I pasted the script and Pictory auto-selected stock clips, added narration, and assembled a video. The output was basically a stock footage slideshow with voiceover on top. About 20 minutes. Fine for internal presentations where production value isn't the priority.
Craze was a genuinely different experience. I typed the brief and the AI started asking questions: what platform is this for, what visual tone, what should the hero product look like? It wrote a storyboard, generated reference images to lock the visual direction, then produced video clips, voiceover, and music. Everything landed on a multi-track timeline that I could adjust. About 18 minutes from brief to export. The output didn't look like a template because there wasn't one involved, the clips matched the visual direction we'd established together, and the voiceover timing aligned with the cuts naturally because the AI had planned the timing before generating.
What we actually switched to
We moved our from-scratch production work (product ads, social content, brand teasers) to Craze. Interview and podcast editing stayed in Descript, because it's still the best tool for that specific job. We kept one Premiere license for complex projects that need frame-level color grading or multi-cam work.
The deciding factor wasn't any single feature. It was pipeline compression. Going from brief to finished video in one tool eliminates the file management, tool switching, and format compatibility headaches that were burning hours every week. At fifteen videos a month, shaving 30 minutes per project recovers about 7.5 hours monthly, which is almost a full workday just from reducing friction.`
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