If you’ve always wanted to be a film director, here’s your chance. Thanks to the proliferation of creative tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI), honing your directorial skills has never been easier.
Heck, AI video generating tools like OpenAI’s Sora can even conjure up scenes from scratch. You don’t even need to yell “CUT!” on a director’s chair anymore, because some of the videos are impressive. Here, we dive deep into what AI video generators are, and the best ones of 2024.
Table of contents
What is an AI text-to-video generator?
As its name suggests, an AI text-to-video generator is a tool that produces AI-generated video based on the text prompt entered by the user.
For example, as OpenAI’s Sora video generator demonstrated, you could simply enter a funny prompt like “Two golden retrievers podcasting on top of a mountain”, and it’ll spit out a short clip of exactly that.
What features do the best AI video generators have?
As with many AI-powered creative tools, AI video generators come with a suite of features to assist in your video creation. They include:
- B-rolls or stock images: Duh.
- Custom avatars: To make videos more engaging, AI video generators often allow the user to build custom avatars. Like Sims characters, they come in male, female, a wide selection of skin colours, and so on.
- Custom voices: Duh.
- Auto-translation: AI video generators are multilingual 😉 Besides English, many of the tools are able to produce videos with audio in other major languages such as French, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese and Russian.
The 5 best AI video generators
Now that we’ve learned what AI video generating tools are capable of, here’s a roundup of the best ones in the market.
1. Synthesia
Synthesia, which counts major brands like Reuters, Zoom and Heineken as clients, is one of the top AI video generators in the market. In addition to AI-generated videos, users can also create synthetic voices that come in over 130 languages.
2. HeyGen
Founded and based in Shenzhen, China, HeyGen garnered much media attention after it shared a deepfake video of Taylor Swift speaking Mandarin. Users select an avatar first, then proceed with AI video generation as per usual.
3. DeepBrain
DeepBrain allows users to quickly produce an AI-generated video from text prompts. The platform also lets you produce multi-avatar scenes, which means — for example — that instead of one deepfake news anchor on your screen, you can have two.
You could even direct your avatar to make hand gestures and various movements to add flavour to your AI video.
4. Canva
Billion-dollar Aussie tech company Canva has been integrating AI features into its photo editing platform amid Silicon Valley’s ongoing AI race.
5. Sora
Sorry folks, OpenAI’s most powerful AI video generator Sora isn’t publicly available yet, but we’re including it in this list because of how impressive it is. Sam Altman personally directed several AI-generated videos with the tool when it was first introduced to the world.
As of writing, Sora is available only to red teamers, aka cybersecurity professionals.
Which is the best AI tool for video editing?
For now, Synthesia is probably the most trusted AI video generator tool. It’s preferred by major companies and comes with an enterprise package. If OpenAI releases Sora one day, we’ll update the article with new information. *wink*
Image: mixetto via Getty Images
