Generative AI has witnessed some fascinating developments and breakthroughs over the last year. As the world continues to familiarize and incorporate AI text and image creation, AI for video generation is getting up to speed as well.
Video content has become a non-negotiable for businesses and content creators in this highly competitive visual climate. A significant amount of people prefer it over other forms of content, and in the coming years the majority of online content will be video content.
Reports reflect this, too: 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2023, an all-time high since 2016, and 70% of non-video marketers plan to start video marketing in 2023.
Traditionally, video creation has always been a time-consuming and costly process. It also, to an extent, requires technical knowledge of certain tools and access to certain resources.
AI video generation is capable of making this process extremely streamlined, and one can soon expect AI to create videos easily and in way less time than conventional methods.
It stands to revolutionize the way people make content, be it for personal or professional use.
Background
Last year saw researchers and companies getting started with AI text-to-video generation.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, introduced Make-a-Video in September, an AI model that allows users to input a rough description of a scene and generates a small video matching the input. The model was an upgrade to their Make-a-Scene image generator. The videos are blurred and roughly animated, no longer than 5 seconds and contain no audio.
Google AI soon followed Meta and updated a new function, Imagen, to support video creation. Both are currently in the research and development phase, and it is only a preparation for the rapid improvement in output that one can expect in the near future.
More recently, Runway, a generative AI startup by the creators of Stable Diffusion, introduced their Gen1 model, a model that doesn’t generate new AI videos but rather creates videos from the ones you upload, using text or image prompts to apply effects to those videos. It basically works by supplying placeholders for AI to replace.
Current best AI video generation tools
While there is still work to do for end-to-end video-to-text generation, there are multiple tools available that can still aid in making the video generation process smoother.
- Synthesia:
Synthesia helps the user to create videos using AI avatars quickly. There is no need for elaborate filming equipment or sets; one can choose from over 70 different AI avatars or can customise their own. The platform also has over 60 languages, multiple video templates, a screen recorder, a media library, and much more.
- Pictory
Pictory is a wonderful tool to help one edit as well as create high-quality videos. It does not require any prior technical knowledge or video editing experience. Pictory utilises any script or articles as the base content for the video, has a wide range of customisable templates, and also allows users to create short, sharable video highlight reels, which is great for trailers and short videos for social media.
- Synthesys
Synthesys is great for enhancing one’s video content by converting scripts into impressive media presentations. A lot of creators make use of the platform to produce lip-sync AI videos. One can choose from over 70 “Humatars” and 250+ voicebank styles to customise their video; all they have to do is type in their script in one of the 66+ languages available, Synthesys takes over from there. The tool also allows for easy editing and rendering of the video and high-resolution output.
Have you tried any of these yet? Let us know in the comments below!
