Executive Overview
The post-production industry is currently navigating an unprecedented technological transition. While generative artificial intelligence dominates headlines with promises of text-to-video synthesis and synthetic media generation, professional film and video editors have remained largely skeptical. Their hesitation is not born of technophobia, but of utility; most modern AI video tools require creators to abandon their native environments, upload proprietary assets to external cloud platforms, and wrestle with unpredictable, uneditable outputs.
Enter Nice Touch V2, an AI-powered workflow and edit assistant engineered specifically to address these friction points. Developed by UK-based post-production veterans and built on a foundation of over 300 intensive consultations with editors, directors, and studio executives, Nice Touch V2 represents a structural shift in how AI is integrated into professional creative pipelines.
Operating natively within Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, Nice Touch V2 does not attempt to replace the creative eye of the editor. Instead, it automates the laborious, mechanical "front-end" of the editing process—the ingestion, organization, transcription, and initial assembly of raw footage. By executing tedious tasks like stringouts, multicam sync passes, and initial assemblies in 18 languages directly within the editor’s existing timeline, Nice Touch V2 aims to reclaim the hours lost to mechanical labor, leaving the definitive creative decisions entirely in human hands.
Detailed Chronology: From the Trenches of Corporate Production to V2
To understand the architecture of Nice Touch V2, one must look at the operational history of its founders, Matthew Cooksey (CEO) and Paul Simon (CPO). The duo spent twelve years building the video production arm of Circus Street, scaling it from a nascent startup department into a massive, 200-strong global production machine.
[Circus Street Video Production Arm]
│ (12 Years of Scaling)
▼
[High-Volume Global Delivery] ──► TV & VFX Content (Nike, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pfizer)
│
▼
[Operational Milestones] ───────► £0.5M Virtual Studio / 60+ Hours of Content in 20 Languages
│
▼
[Company Acquired by QA] ────────► £50 Million Valuation (The Spark for Nice Touch)During their tenure, Cooksey and Simon produced high-end commercial, corporate, and VFX-grade content for some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Nestlé, and Pfizer. Under Cooksey’s leadership, the team established a £0.5 million virtual studio, delivering over 60 hours of localized content across 20 languages to more than half a million viewers worldwide. This massive operation culminated in Circus Street’s acquisition by QA for £50 million.
Operating at this scale exposed a persistent systemic bottleneck in the post-production pipeline. While cameras, storage solutions, and visual effects software advanced exponentially, the fundamental process of starting an edit remained virtually unchanged. Whether working in Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, or Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, every project began with a familiar, grueling ritual: sorting through hours of raw footage, manually transcribing interviews, isolating selects, and building rough assemblies.
Whenever the Circus Street team encountered software limitations, they built custom scripts and tools to bypass them. This developer-editor instinct ultimately led to the founding of Nice Touch in 2025. Backed by pre-seed funding from Circus Street’s original founders, Rich and Jonny Townsend—both of whom now sit on the Nice Touch board—the company set out to build the tool they wished they had during their years in high-volume production.
Version 1 of Nice Touch proved the core concept: that AI could accurately parse video and understand spoken dialogue. However, the feedback from early users was clear. Editors did not want another external platform or web browser dashboard that disrupted their muscle memory. They needed a tool that lived inside their existing non-linear editing (NLE) software. Armed with this feedback, the founders initiated a complete ground-up rebuild, resulting in the launch of Nice Touch V2.
Supporting Context & Technical Metrics: The Anatomy of an AI Assistant
Nice Touch V2 operates on a simple premise: do not cross the creative line. The software is designed to handle the mechanical, objective aspects of editing, leaving the subjective, artistic choices to the human editor.
Native NLE Integration and Workflow Mechanics
Unlike traditional AI tools that export finished video files, Nice Touch V2 acts as a background processor that communicates directly with the host application (Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve).
- Local and Secure Ingestion: The software analyzes project footage, generating highly accurate, word-level transcriptions with automatic speaker separation across 18 languages.
- Natural Language Direction: Instead of manually scrubbing through hours of footage to find specific quotes or actions, the editor directs Nice Touch using plain language (e.g., "Find all instances where the speaker mentions ‘sustainability’ and create a 90-second assembly").
- Timeline Generation: Rather than rendering a flat video file, Nice Touch builds the requested edit directly on the NLE timeline. It populates the timeline with real, editable clips, cuts, transition markers, and audio tracks. The editor can immediately move, trim, or replace these assets as if they had cut them manually.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| NICE TOUCH V2 WORKFLOW |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| 1. RAW FOOTAGE INGESTION |
| [Footage Loaded] ---> [Whisper-Based Transcription] |
| * Word-level accuracy |
| * Speaker separation (18 languages) |
| |
| 2. PLAIN-LANGUAGE COMMANDS |
| User Input: "Assemble all takes of Speaker A discussing..."|
| |
| 3. NATIVE TIMELINE RECONSTRUCTION |
| [NLE API Integration] |
| └─► Generates: Real Clips | Cuts | Sync Markers |
| |
| 4. HUMAN-CENTRIC REFINEMENT |
| [Fully editable timeline - No creative decisions locked] |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+The Versatility of V2 Outputs
Different genres of post-production demand different organizational structures. Nice Touch V2 is designed to accommodate this variety by supporting multiple output formats:
- Selects & Stringouts: Quickly gathering the best takes of specific lines or actions.
- Assemblies & Cutdowns: Generating rough chronological cuts of interviews or narratives based on script templates.
- Multicam Passes: Synchronizing and organizing multi-camera shoots based on audio transcripts and visual cues.
- Paper Edits & Soundbites: Translating text-based script outlines directly into physical timeline sequences.
Commercial Availability and Pricing Model
Nice Touch V2 is commercially available via a tiered subscription model designed to accommodate independent freelancers, boutique post-houses, and enterprise-level agencies. To lower the barrier to entry, the company offers a five-day free trial that includes 2,000 processing credits with all features unlocked.
| Subscription Tier | Monthly Cost (GBP) | Included Monthly Credits | Target Audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Trial | £0 (5 Days) | 2,000 | Individual testing and evaluation |
| Pro | £50 / month | 7,000 | Independent editors and freelancers |
| Ultra | £250 / month | 40,000 | Mid-sized production houses and agencies |
Note: Optional pay-as-you-go credit top-ups are available for all plans, with pricing standardized in GBP, USD, and EUR to accommodate global teams.
Official Statements and Industry Reception
The industry’s reception of Nice Touch V2 highlights a growing appetite for pragmatic, non-intrusive automation. Prior to writing a single line of code for the rebuild, the development team conducted over 300 interviews with industry professionals. The consensus was clear: editors felt alienated by the aggressive positioning of mainstream generative AI tools.
Paul Simon, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Nice Touch, contextualized this sentiment:
“For twelve years, whenever we hit something the tools couldn’t do, we built it ourselves. This is the same instinct, with better technology behind it. We didn’t want to build another AI tool that editors had to fight with. The goal was to create something that behaves exactly like a highly efficient assistant editor sitting next to you.”
This focus on preserving creative autonomy has won over notable industry veterans. One editor with over 30 years of experience, who had previously boycotted AI integration in his workflow, noted that Nice Touch won him over precisely because it "doesn’t touch the creative calls."
Matthew Cooksey, CEO and Co-Founder, emphasized the practical utility of the platform:
“What kept coming up in those 300 conversations was that the AI needed to feel like it was working alongside the editor, not around them. We have spent our whole careers doing this job, so we knew exactly which part of it we wanted to give back to the creators. Nobody went to film school to sync multicam clips or spend eight hours building a paper edit. We want to eliminate that friction.”
The platform is already gaining traction in diverse institutional environments. Early adopters include Podymos, a specialized healthcare marketing agency that requires precise, multi-lingual video assets, and the University of Georgia School of Social Work, which utilizes the tool to quickly synthesize educational and research-driven video content.
Future Outlook: Defining the Ethical and Creative Boundary of AI in Post-Production
The launch of Nice Touch V2 comes at a critical juncture for the post-production industry. As corporate video demand increases and post-production budgets tighten, editors are under immense pressure to deliver high-quality content at unprecedented speeds.
Historically, technology shifts in editing—such as the transition from physical film splicing to linear tape editing, and eventually to non-linear digital systems (NLEs)—were met with initial skepticism but ultimately resulted in greater creative freedom. Nice Touch V2 is positioned to drive a similar evolution. By automating the objective, mechanical tasks of editing, the software allows editors to spend more time on pacing, subtext, music selection, and emotional resonance—the elements of filmmaking that require genuine human empathy and artistic judgment.
Furthermore, Nice Touch’s localized, timeline-native approach addresses growing corporate concerns regarding data privacy and intellectual property. By processing edits locally within established NLE architectures rather than relying on external, black-box creative generation, Nice Touch offers a secure workflow that complies with the strict NDAs and asset-protection protocols typical of major studios and enterprise brands.
As Nice Touch continues to expand its language capabilities beyond its current 18-language offering and refines its integration APIs, it stands as a model for how AI should be implemented in creative industries: not as an automated replacement for the artist, but as a tireless assistant designed to keep the human creator firmly in control of the craft.
