Mastering AI for Video Generation: An Ultimate Overview
While the demand for marketing content increased by 1.5 times last year, only 55% of marketing teams felt prepared to meet this surge, according to Deloitte’s research on Gen AI Powers Content Marketing Advantage for Early Adopters. Finding ways to meet this need, particularly through accelerating content creation, has never been so crucial. Deloitte’s research also shows that while video production is one of the most complex, lengthy, and costly aspects of marketing content creation, video content achieves significantly higher engagement compared to other content types, often receiving 1200% more shares than any written content. As a result, video content generation has become one of the top priorities for many marketing teams.
Fortunately, AI now offers multiple solutions to simplify and accelerate video production while cutting down expenses. In this article, we will explore the top platforms that provide AI for video generation, examine the most common use cases for AI-generated video content, and discuss a workflow that has enabled us to produce videos twice as fast at a fraction of the cost.
An Overview of Platforms that Leverage Generative AI for Video Creation
Recently, the rise of generative AI tools has spurred a significant increase in the number of versatile AI video generation platforms. In 2023, the market value for AI video generation reached $554.9 million, leading to the emergence of dozens of applications that utilize generative AI for video content creation.
Numerous tools have gained momentum in the video production landscape, each offering solutions for a wide array of tasks. In this article, we’ll delve into these tools in detail, examining their most effective applications, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.
As we’ve observed, despite the diverse range of tasks, there’s a wide array of generative AI platforms available for both video editing and post-production, as well as for converting text to video or image to video. These platforms offer both free and paid options. Naturally, there’s a question: how should one choose among these platforms? Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of these AI video generation tools.
The Pros and Cons of Platforms That Use Generative AI for Video Creation
All the platforms mentioned above have either established themselves as valuable tools for streamlining video content production through generative AI or have demonstrated impressive outcomes during testing phases. We have conducted field tests on real-world tasks to assess their suitability for creating high-quality content, evaluating whether they combine the necessary features for successful video content generation.
The Most Common Use Cases of AI for Video Generation
The tasks commonly addressed with AI-generated videos span a broad spectrum, including educational materials, e-commerce, and social media content.
Yet, it is video content tailored for marketing purposes that stands as the most prevalent application of AI-generated video materials. Marketing teams are increasingly utilizing AI-generated videos to boost engagement on websites, achieve higher click-through rates in email campaigns, and nurture leads via webinars and training sessions.
While there is a relatively gentle learning curve for these AI tools, once marketing teams grow proficient in using them, they’re able to achieve results quickly for future projects. However, it’s important to recognize that creating an AI-generated video is just one phase in the intricate video production process. Even with generated footage available, video designers must engage in post-production work, using Adobe Creative Suite or similar tools, to achieve the desired outcome and ensure that the video is high quality. Later in this article, we will discuss how videos can be generated using AI, but we will not delve into the complex details of video post-production.
How to Use Generative AI for Video Creation: a Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1. Preparation
Before you start generating a video, you need to determine what exactly you need to generate. All videos must have a script that should be in perfect alignment with the initial marketing goal. You can easily generate a script using ChatGPT by asking it to provide the narration, text on screen, and suggestions on what should be included in each of the scenes.
Here’s an example of one of the scenes that contains a script generated for one of the promo videos created by Akvelon:
Also, in this case, we used a voiceover and an AI tool from Elevenlabs.
Step 2. AI image generation based on a text prompt
It all starts with having an image you are going to convert into a video — and, luckily, it can be AI-generated via Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or other similar platforms, based on a detailed prompt you have to provide. To create such a prompt, you can safely use ChatGPT.
For example, here’s a prompt that was created for one of the images that later was used in the video scenes:
“Close shot of AI experts team working on projects: 1, on a background, we can see a futuristic office space for the company IT company set 200 years in the future. The office space is designed to embrace advanced technology, sustainability, and employee well-being. Integrated AI, sustainability measures, flexible workspaces. Green roofs and solar panels, ergonomic furniture, and access to natural light. Light background, light orange color, super detailed, future tech. Canon EOS 5D Mark IV DSLR, f/5.6 aperture, 1/125 second shutter speed, ISO 100, –ar 16:9.”
Feel free to specify the style in which you want the image to be generated.
If you are using Stable Diffusion, we also recommend you create a depth mask of all the images you are going to use for further video generation.
Step 3. Image animation with generative AI
It would be very brave to say that every scene can be animated using AI seamlessly. While some images can be animated with tools like AI Tool Gen 2, for other cases, you will still have to use Adobe After Effects.
However, the good news is that you can still accelerate the process of turning images into videos. Roughly, the speed increase is 2x at this stage.
Step 4. Post-production process
When all the scenes are ready, it’s time to use Adobe After Effects for post-production. All the generated scenes should be placed within one video project. There, you’ll be able to add transitions, adjust some motion effects, and add titles, voiceovers, and music.
After everything is ready, all you have to do is render your video and use it whenever you find that it is suitable.
Check out our video that was created based on the workflow described above:
Final thoughts
While leveraging AI for video generation cannot become a magic pill that immediately gives you results with no effort, the platforms that offer AI-powered video generation still manage to cut the time needed for some of the stages of video production in half, and also save significant amounts of money by reducing the need to buy stock video content. Though AI-generated videos still need post-production, the technology keeps evolving, and we keep looking forward to new ways of supercharging video content creation.
