The days of needing extensive editing experience and a hefty budget just to make a professional-quality video are over. A new wave of AI-powered video generators has arrived, empowering anyone with a laptop and internet connection to craft stunning and engaging videos in just a few clicks.
It’s currently in beta release and is free to use, though as with most generative AI platforms, the free tier is highly restricted, which makes running multiple iterations of an idea a significant challenge. In this case, free users can create 10 videos per day, three videos concurrently, and receive 300 “credits.
The free tier of Pika offers 250 initial credits to use for things like performing video generations and adding time to videos. Those credits refill to 30 daily once your initial stash run out and Lip Syncing audio costs 2 credits each. The $8/month Standard plan includes 700 credits that renew monthly , free lip syncing, the ability to download videos and upscale resolutions, do away with the watermark, and extend the video length.
The free version of Canva offers users access to the editor, more than a million templates and more than 3 million stock photos, thousands of design types from social posts to resumes, and 5GB of cloud storage. The $20/month Canva Pro subscription offers more than 100 million stock images, graphics, and audio clips, more than 20 AI tools, and 1TB of storage.
Entering the test prompt of “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” returned the image above, and when fed back into the system to create a video, became a dreamlike four-second clip where the dogs’ bodies roiled and melted into one another as they ran. And while the system got the basic aspects of the prompt correct, there is very little Ghibli influence to be seen.