Why is no one automating asset acquisition? The most tedious part of editing and AI is completely ignoring it.
If you know Fireship (the dev YouTube channel), you know the style: fast cuts every 2–3 seconds, dense information, a constant stream of visuals that match exactly what's being said. Every sentence is illustrated. A GIF when something is chaotic. A clean icon when naming a tool. A 3-second stock clip when describing a concept. A meme reaction when something is absurd. The pacing is relentless and the visuals do as much work as the voiceover.
I make videos in that style
Here's what that actually means in practice for a single 5-minute video:
— 15–25 stock footage clips (concept illustrations, transitions, establishing shots)
— 10–20 icons (tool logos, UI elements, abstract concepts like "database" or "API")
— 8–15 GIFs or reaction clips (Tenor / Giphy
— 5–10 meme images or screen grabs
— Sometimes looping background visuals just to keep the frame alive
That's 40–70 individual assets. Per video. Conservatively.
Now here's where it gets soul-crushing.
For every single one of those assets, my workflow is:
- Think of what I need ("I need something that says 'this is broken'")
- Open Flaticon, type a keyword, scroll through results, most are wrong style or wrong weight, find something okay, save
- Open Tenor, search something, the first 20 results are too generic or too old, keep scrolling
- Open Pexels / Artgrid, search, filter by orientation and duration, preview 8 clips, download 3, use 1
- Repeat steps 1–4 between 40 and 70 times
I'm not exaggerating when I say asset hunting takes 2–3 hours of a 6-hour editing session. It's not creative work. It's not editing. It's just... search. Manually. On four different tabs. Over and over.
And the wild part? We're in the middle of an AI boom. Claude can write code. Sora generates video. There are tools for literally everything in the content pipeline
But nobody seems to have built the obvious thing: a tool where you describe what you need (or paste your script), and it searches all your asset sources at once
Not AI-generated assets. Real assets from real libraries. Just found intelligently, in bulk, based on what your video actually needs.
Does this tool exist? Has anyone built a workflow that gets close to this? An n8n template, a Python script, literally anything?
I've looked. I can't find it. And I find that genuinely strange given how many people edit in this style and how much time it eats. any solutions please? thanks everyone in advance.