I've made my living that way and absolutely loved it. What I did not love (and partly why I left the industry) was the difficulty of getting paid decently at the bottom tier; I had the bad timing to come in right as the bottom was beginning to fall out of the indie market and making straight-to-video b-movies 3 or 4 times a year ceased to be a viable business model.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in.
The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.
I have not confused it, I'm simplifying to make a point. Yes, of course there are many people who love the art of editing, or taking the right shot, or acting, or directing, or special effects, or all of the 100s of things that go into making a movie or TV show or other video.
But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not?
When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one.
Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.
I don't buy this simplification claim; you literally described the core skillset as drudgery. Put another way, what parts of film editing do you not consider drudgery? Could it be that you tried it previously and just didn't really like it?
And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe...
The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.
The "someone must have lost out economically" argument falls fairly hollow when you actually look at the stats and see that the vast, vast majority of people end up better economically when we develop technology and increase efficiency.
Luddism is never the answer.
Scratch that; luddism is the answer for people who don't actually care about humanity as a whole (but frequently pretend they do) and just want their hobby or their job or their neighborhood to stay the same and for everyone else to stop ruining things. But for the rest of the world, increasing technological efficiency means more people get more things for less. This is good actually.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in.
The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.