Headlines have been heavy lately: respected post houses closing, budgets shifting, legacy workflows falling behind. But let’s be real; creativity isn’t dying. It’s adapting. As noted by LBBOnline, the closure of iconic post houses isn’t a creative collapse; it's a business model reset.
According to new data from OpenAI’s GDPVAL study, AI models are now outperforming humans on professional tasks in 44 occupations, sometimes by margins as high as 81%.
For post-production, that’s more than a stat; it’s a turning point.
The studios thriving right now aren’t fighting the tide but riding it. They’re blending artistry with automation and finding new ways to keep the work fresh, fast, and fearless. The best teams aren’t replacing humans with machines. They’re folding tools like Runway, Veo, and GenAI based toolkits into the process, intentionally, with a human eye leading the way.
“AI has reshaped how I work,” says Whitehouse Post editor Brian May. “From Adobe’s steady rollout of new AI tools to platforms like ChatGPT, Luma, Gemini, and MidJourney, they’ve all become huge time-savers in the edit. Time I can now put toward other creative parts of the project. It’s made the whole process faster and more fluid, but more importantly, it’s opened up more room for genuine creative collaboration.”
These tools don’t replace editors or artists. They amplify them. That amplification isn’t just felt in the edit bay or the flame suite; our clients and brand partners feel it too. Projects move faster, creative options expand, and budgets stretch further without compromising craft. Faster visualization and real time iteration mean more collaboration, not less.
This kind of value came to life in Carbon’s recent collaboration with Vizio and Digitas on the SoundBars campaign. Each commercial transformed an ordinary living space into a series of dynamic worlds: an icy tundra, a lush rainforest, a video game arena, and a Western town. Carbon blended traditional VFX and CG with AI-assisted design using Runway, Veo, Krea, and Adobe tools. AI was used through the process, from pre-vis and style framing, where early concepts helped clients visualize environments sooner, to production and post, where AI filled gaps and solved unexpected challenges (like creating realistic animal close-ups when live-action shots didn’t go as planned).
“What’s exciting is how fast we can get ideas in front of clients now,” says Carbon’s VFX Supervisor Michael Sarabia. “AI lets us build moodboards, styleframes, or quick CG comps that help everyone visualize the direction earlier in the process. It doesn’t replace traditional VFX, but expands it. On SoundBars, we used AI to rough out environments and action beats in a way that made conversations with the agency and director faster and more collaborative.”
By integrating these tools strategically, Carbon delivered faster turnarounds, richer visual options, and greater creative flexibility, allowing clients more ways to explore and refine ideas without the typical budget trade-offs. This ai-assisted workflow makes every stage more collaborative, more dynamic, and ultimately more rewarding for the brands we partner with.
Technology has never been a threat to craft at Whitehouse Post and Carbon. It’s part of our DNA. As Whitehouse Post and Carbon’s Director of Technology Jeff Drury puts it, “We have always built ourselves upon digital innovation as much as creativity, using technology to help brands produce their best work. We were among the first post facilities to leverage digital editorial, high bandwidth connections between offices, and remote client review.”
Every new integration, from data management to AI generated content to smarter asset management, has been conceived through the filter of craftsmanship. For Whitehouse Post and Carbon, AI is another creative partner in the room. It doesn’t make choices for editors or artists; it helps those choices go further.
Looking forward, Whitehouse Post and Carbon will stay on the forefront of technology, enabling advertisers via scalable machine learning technologies and tools, all in service of one thing: better storytelling.
AI may win on paper, but it still can’t feel rhythm. It doesn’t know when to hold a cut or when a pause says more than a line of dialogue ever could.
AI doesn’t have taste.
It doesn’t have intuition.
It doesn’t take creative risks.
All of which keep the craft of editorial and postproduction alive. We live in the space between instinct and innovation, between timeline and imagination. The question isn’t whether AI will change post. The question is: how will we use AI to make the work even stronger?
At Whitehouse Post and Carbon, we’re not waiting for the future; we’re continuing to build scalable, cloud-based studios and to harness the power of Generative AI, the same spirit of experimentation that’s driven us since the beginning.
If you’re ready to explore what AI can actually do, reach out. We’re already building the post house of the future, and we’d love to show you how it looks.