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.
Leading the way is OpenAI’s Sora, an AI capable of generating minutes’ worth of photorealistic video in moments — or it will when it’s actually released to the public. Until then, you can try out any of these innovative AI tools for free and easily turn your cinematic ideas into reality. At the very least, they’re pretty fun to play around with.
Haiper 1.5
Haiper 1.5 was developed by a team of former Google DeepMind researchers and designed to compete with the likes of Sora and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha model. The AI generates either 2- or 4-second-long clips based on your input text, images, or even other videos, and takes around 2-3 minutes to produce once you get to the head of the generation queue.
Using the system is straightforward. Simply choose a template — Text, Image, or Video to Video — input your prompt and upload your image or video, then click create and wait for the AI to do its thing. However, you’re going to need to run through a few edits and iterations to get the clip looking and sounding good. To do that you’re going to want to brush up on your prompt engineering skills because I asked it to create “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” and it gave me this (you can watch the clip here).
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.” Upgrading to the $8/month (billed annually) Explorer tier gains you unlimited creations per day, five concurrent generations, and 1,500 non-expiring credits per month, as well as the ability to download videos without watermarks and set their sharing status to private on Haiper’s platform. The $24/month Pro package offers all that plus unlimited total creations, 10 concurrent generations, and 5,000 non-expiring credits per month.
Pika 1.0
Pika is a free-to-use AI generation tool from the startup of the same name. It offers a suite of tools centering on its generative model that can create and edit videos in a variety of styles from anime to cinematic. The free AI video generator can create clips up to three seconds in length (24 fps), based on the user’s text and image inputs. Users can also edit existing videos, changing their overall style, adding effects or adjusting the in-frame content, as well as adjusting parameters like the aspect ratio.
Using Pika is not hard, though there is a bit of a learning curve, as there was with Haiper, if you want to create more than a basic three-second clip. You can either enter your prompt into the window or have Pika auto-suggest styles and subjects to try. Users can also add sound effects manually or have the platform insert them automatically. The generator will even lip sync spoken audio to the avatar on screen, expand the canvas, and focus in on specific regions of the generated video on subsequent iterations. If three-seconds isn’t long enough, users can add four-second increments to their video at the expense of credits.
I gave it the standard “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” prompt and waited the two minutes. The system returned not one but four potential video clips to review and further refine. Overall, the quality is roughly on par with Haiper, lots of visual hallucinations and artifacts including disappearing/reappearing dog tails and too many legs.
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 (plus the option to purchase more at a discount), free lip syncing, the ability to download videos and upscale resolutions, do away with the watermark, and extend the video length.
For $28/month, you get Unlimited, with grants “Unlimited Chill generations,” 2,000 credits that renew monthly (and 30/day if those run out) as well as the benefits from the Standard tier. The $58/month Pro level pushes your generations to the front of the queue (aka “Lightning generations”) and gives you unlimited credits to play with.
Canva
Canva is a digital design platform that is as powerful as it is easy to use and able to create everything from business presentations and brand logos to social media graphics, videos, and GIFs. Users can create their projects based on the platforms templates and style suggestions or begin from a blank canvas, adding text, graphics, brand logos, uploaded images, and freehand drawn aspects to their work. Or they can activate the Magic Media feature, powered by Runway, and have the Canva AI generate images and video clips anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours in length.
Each generation request costs 1 credit and free-tier users only get 5 to start. The system is very stringent on what artistic styles it is allowed to use so “dogs running through a green grass meadow towards a distant castle in the style of Ghibli films like Spirited Away” didn’t actually work as the system objected to both Ghibli and Spirited Away. Sans those terms, the AI took just a minute or two to return the horror above. More fine-tuning is definitely needed, though unlike some of the other apps discussed in this guide, Canva will allow you to download your video directly as an MP4.
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. Canva Teams is $100/month/member (minimum three) allows companies to centralize all of their branding and marketing efforts with real-time collaboration and design approvals, AI-generated branding copy, and AI admin controls.
Based Labs
Based Labs is an image and video platform with a suite of cutting-edge AI tools that can generate everything from photorealistic images and videos to digital selfies and tattoo designs, all from text inputs. Users can leverage the platform’s AI-enabled face- and gender-swapping apps and tools to expand and upscale images for free as well. Based Labs offers users access to nearly a dozen different AI image generation models including Stable Diffusion 3.
Generating images with Based Labs is easy. Just sign in, click Generate, and input your prompt after selecting the model engine, number of output images, and their aspect ratios. The generation process takes just a minute or two. Generating video with Based Labs is far more complicated, mostly because the platform largely leaves it to you to figure the process out for yourself.
See, first you have to generate an image using the steps above. Then you have to feed that image back into the system (or just upload one that you already have), open it in the Editor, then select image to video in the drop-down menu above the top-left corner of the image on screen. It took me nearly 45 minutes of fiddling, Googling, and swearing to stumble upon the correct technique, though I suppose that’s a small price to pay to be able to generate professional quality images and video (and then download them) for free.
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.
Each creation costs between 1 and 5 credits, with free-tier users starting with 13 credits. A $25/month Creator subscription will net you 1,000 credits/month while the $49/month Pro package grants users 3,600 credits/month.
Invideo AI
Invideo AI is the AI video generation tool from ElevenLabs, and is as simple and straightforward to use as Based Labs is complex. Users simply log in, select Create AI Video from the top of the screen, select between the Invideo 2.0 and 1.0 models, then enter their text prompt (up to 25,000 characters in length). Its creation process, however, is by far the slowest of those tested in this guide, requiring more than 10 real-world minutes of loading screen before prompting me to choose the audience, look and feel, and platform to put it on, then another 3-4 minutes to actually create the video.
That said, the resulting video is over a minute long, can be displayed in 480, 720, 1080, and 4K resolutions. The AI did also generously include both a voice over and music for the clip it created, despite having even less Ghibli influence than Based Labs.
Free users start with 10 minutes a week with which to generate video content. They can export four of those videos per week with an Invideo watermark in place. The $20/month Plus subscscription offers 50 minutes/month of creation time (and unlimited exports), access to 80 iStock images per month, 100GB of cloud storage, and two voice clones. Paying $48/month for the Max package nets you 200 minutes/month of generation, 320 iStock images per month, 400 GB of storage and five voice clones.
Runway
Runway is an AI video generator based on the Gen model developed by company founders Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala, and Anastasis Germanidis. It offers a wide variety of AI tools including text and image to video, video-to-video editing, generative audio, and text-to-image tools. Users can generate clips in either five- or 10-second durations and at 720p resolution. Prompt engineering is an important skill to have here as well. The system is able to incorporate myriad storytelling aspects including the desired subject, scene, lighting, as well as camera movements and transitions. As with most generative AIs, the more detail and instruction you can include in the prompt, the more accurate the resulting content will be.
Like Based Labs, Runway requires the user to first generate or upload an image in order to create a video from it. I created the image above using Runway’s text-to-image generator, then fed it back into the image-to-video generator with additional instructions about how the characters and camera needed to move. The results were not so much Ghibli-esque as they were face-melting psychedelic.
Unfortunately, users at the free tier are restricted to using the older Gen-2 model and are limited to 500 credits per month. However, a $12 Standard subscription offers 625 credits a month (enough to create ten seconds of Gen-3 Alpha video, 15 seconds of Gen-1 video to video editing, and 16 seconds for Gen-2 video), as well as the ability to upscale videos between Gen-1 and Gen-2 models, the removal of watermarks from content generated by any of the three models. The $28/month Pro plan offers 2,250 credits a month while $76/month scores you the Unlimited tier that, you guessed it, provides unlimited credits per month, along with a slew of other benefits.
Final thoughts
Each of these half-dozen AI video generators offers users a slightly different experience and capability. Picking the right one for you depends largely on what you plan to use it for. For example, Invideo is tailor-made to generate walk-through and explainer videos for YouTube (there’s even a handy workflow plugin to do specifically that), while Haiper and Pika are better suited for creating short-form content for social media posts.
Canva doesn’t generate as high-quality (and low-hallucination) images as Based Labs does, but is far easier to navigate and use, making the former better for hobbyists and casual users and the latter more appropriate for professional designers. The best part is, all of these AI are free to use, so try them all out and see what works best for you.
