How We Are Leveraging AI Technology For Video Production

In this article I’m going to share some ways we are leveraging AI tools to help improve and streamline our marketing video productions.

Recently we have been using AI for copy content generation–as covered in the previous article–and more recently photo-realistic image generation. In cases where a particular image is not available through the traditional stock photo sites, AI has been exceptionally useful to create marketing images much more quickly than us having to go to a location, hire models, bring lighting and the related gear to the site, nevermind the time effort and cost it takes to get there! That being said a professional photo shoot will still be second to none and there are absolutely cases where AI image generation will not suffice i.e. a team photo in front of the company building.

Prompt: I would like an image with the same theme and the same colors as this (referring to previous article image I uploaded), it is going to be the image for the next article in the series. The image is for an article titled “How We Are Leveraging AI Technology For Video Production” I would like to see a stylized film strip and something that looks like frames from a video

AI Tools for Video Production

So the natural progression is that we have started leveraging AI tools for video production, if you think about it a video is just a series of still frames but a whole lot of them! If you don’t know, there’s going to be about 30 frames for every second of video. We know that for decades there has been incredible CG graphics and computer animation on our screens and in theaters so seeing some of the AI video generation models working is not a huge surprise. It is more impressive that these videos can be generated from a prompt rather than a series of complex inputs, models and actions through a software platform. We have experimented with some of these video generation platforms (i.e. Veo) with varying results in my experience so far. It worked well to replace stocl footage in some cases, but it did not do well to have a complex and polished logo animation. It was taking a lot of prompting and a lot of wasted credits to not even get close to the animation quality that I was looking for.

However, I did get a couple good clips generated and have successfully used Veo other AI tools in the past months to help produce a social media video for a client. I used a few different tools at different stages of the process:

Step 1: I used a generative large language model (LLM), specifically Google Gemini, to create a treatment and storyboard for the video with of course some medium sized prompts to provide the direction and the vision that I had in mind for the project. The resulting documents were then shared with the client and allowed them to provide their feedback before going into production. 

Step 2:  Based on the storyboard we also used the LLM to prepare a script capturing the main topics from the storyboard that was constrained to our time frame requirements for the production.

Step 3: Next we used an AI voiceover tool to create the voice actor reading from the script. We were able to choose from a wide selection of voices both male and female, American, UK and several others to create the audio track which was then imported into Adobe Premiere.

Step 4: Once the audio track was in Adobe Premiere we used automation inside the software to create the transcript from the voiceover and then from here we created the animated captions for the video and included existing graphics, stock and generated video footage.

The Result

The result was pretty much exactly what I wanted–we have used AI voice over several times in the past–this was nothing new, but the quality is consistently improving. Considering the costs of the stock footage and the fact that we already owned some footage plus leveraging these AI tools, I got exactly what I want without a lot of wasted time.

You can view the finished video on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7432801620784013312

It is our company policy now to consider how AI can enable us in every project and it tends to do so more and more all the time. If you’re interested in further details related to this project or how we can help streamline your social media video production please contact us.