Roll wants to recreate dolly shots and more using generative AI

techcrunch.com:

Those familiar with Faizan Buzdar, who was until recently the VP of product management at Box, likely associate the entrepreneur with Convo, the digital workspace platform popular among newsrooms (including this one). But Buzdar, whose background is in electronics engineering, has long held a fascination with video and visual effects.

“A lifelong video and photography enthusiast, I’d been making videos on my own for years but noticed video production had largely remained manual with little innovation in recent decades, especially for time-consuming tasks like video editing,” Buzdar told me via email. “Meanwhile, I noticed that iPhone camera and sensor technology had step-function improvements over the past few years, becoming almost equivalent in image quality to DSLRs.”

So while at Box, Buzdar says that he decided to try combining video — an increasingly popular medium — with innovations in AI and machine learning to attempt to improve the video capturing and editing experience. Buzdar tapped Adeel Abbas, a video engineer who while at Twitter contributed to the infrastructure powering the site’s livestreaming features, alongside Saj Khan, Fahad Yaqub and fellow Box exec Michelle Oh to explore the frontiers of tech-accelerated video production. 

Roll is the result. A new app for iOS, it delivers bokeh, multicam shots, motion graphics and — perhaps most intriguing to me — “AI-simulated” sliders, dollies and jibs.

Image Credits: Roll

“Our mission is to disrupt the world of high-quality video production, and become the new standard for video content creation,” Buzdar continued. “Creating great video is a massive upfront investment in gear, equipment, learning how to use that gear, software for editing — we’re getting rid of all