I have received quite a few emails lately touting the benefit of ChatGPT and AI video creation tools to make high quality video content quickly. Naturally that caught my attention because who wouldn’t want to shorten the production workflow for video creation?
I decided to give some of these platforms a whirl. I stuck to the free trial accounts, which may or may not impact the overall experience of using the platforms.
My first example is Steve AI, which boasts several automated video creation tools, with more to come. I didn’t attempt their patented text to animation tool, but will in the coming weeks. I used the blog-to-video option. I dropped the url for this blog post from my website into the field and clicked proceed.
It generated a truncated, but overall useful script, and broke it into scenes. You can edit or change the script as you see fit at this stage of production. For this test, I left the AI generated text unchanged.
The free image library wasn’t as deep as I would have liked, and I had to search through the library a few times to adjust the generated images. The upgraded paid accounts come with deeper libraries . However, that said, the images and stock video were good quality. The platform was a bit buggy. When I attempted to publish the video, I had to go back multiple times to change images that I was told were no longer available… this is right after I had just selected them.
After going through this process a few times, it accepted my changes and I moved on to exporting. At this point, the elapsed time of production was about 15 minutes. And I was taking my time as this was the first time using the platform.
It was here I encountered another bug. I received error messages and the export was canceled. I did this three times and got the same message each time. When I got to the fourth time, I was told I had used up all my free exports, and had to upgrade. Not great.
Took the dog for a walk and when I returned I received three video download links from Steve AI. Not sure if this is a bug, or if I would get a different result with a different video. Without upgrading to a paid account,, I will never know.
The good news was the video that I received was okay. The script it developed was alright. Not great, but usable. This particular blog post was probably a good use case for this tool, it was straightforward, had lots of facts, and was explanatory in nature.
But anything auto generated feels a little bit off. I was tempted to rewrite the script, put some life into the text and upload more appropriate images. And all these things are available to you, but it begs a few questions. Why use an AI tool if you have to start from scratch after using it? Shouldn’t the point of it be to reduce work? And if it can’t accomplish this, is it ready for prime time? Is the utility of the end product the speed in which it is done, or the story it is telling?
I would argue that story always comes first, so tread carefully my friends.
Here is a second attempt at the same blog post from lumen5.
The process was much smoother on this platform, with the biggest difference being the way in which the blog posts are ingested. Lumen5 sets up a feed from your website, and ingests all the articles and they are ready for you to begin the production process.
All of these platforms offer pre-built templates and in this video, I chose one that didn’t require pictures. I sort of like this one better than Steve AI version if only because there are no images that are clearly placeholders. Not the most visually appealing, but given what this video is — an automated edit taken from text — it works.
And while all of these platforms offer the option to select different aspect ratios, lumen5 has a very useful application. Once the edit was done, and I downloaded the 16:9 version, I could easily duplicate the file to 9:16 and re-export a new version. It was seamless and didn’t require any tinkering.
And finally, if you are looking for complete automation, there’s one of the newest players in the AI video editing game, Wochit AI Wizard. Full disclosure, I used to use Wochit as a video editing platform for breaking news video while at HuffPost Canada. It is a really good tool and was an early leader in automated video workflows. But Wochit AI Wizard is next level. The service is currently free, and I can’t imagine it remaining this way for long. This is a fully automated tool that takes your written request and produces a video. No script. No image selection. Easy peasy.
I haven’t inquired yet what customization it offers, and how an organization can add their branding to these videos, but I will be reaching out. In the meantime, you can check out the example below. I asked Wochit AI Wizard to make me a video explaining the health benefits of lemon water.
This is an ever-changing and rapidly evolving space. There are so many players hitting the market and this is by no means a definitive survey. I will be posting more examples over the coming weeks.
Up Next: Testing Chat GPT as a video script writing aide and how well they can be utilized by these AI video creation platforms.
