Imagine a world where your wildest creative visions come to life with just a few clicks, where the boundaries of video creation are pushed by the limitless possibilities of AI. Welcome to the era where advanced artificial intelligence isn’t just for tech gurus – it’s for every aspiring artist, storyteller, and dreamer out there.
Enter the realm of Pika Video AI, a revolutionary generative AI tool that’s changing the game in video editing. With its versatile features, it’s not just breaking new ground; it’s redefining what it means to be a content creator in a digital age brimming with opportunities.
And the best part? It’s completely free to explore and experiment with!
Curious about what makes Pika Video AI stand out? Keep reading and we’ll show plenty of examples of what it can do, and explain how it works.
What Is Pika Video AI?
Pika, which is also known simply as Pika 1.0, is a new generative AI video tool that developed by non-profit organization Pika Labs.
Enter a prompt, add an image, tweak a few parameters, and bam: a 3 second animated clip.
Magic.
Pika Labs is a text-to-video platform that offers a user-friendly interface along with advanced AI capabilities that cater to both amateur users and those who have professional video production needs.
It’s pretty easy to use, and surprisingly powerful, particularly for a free tool. Of course, you get the little “Pika” watermark, but that’s not a big deal for those of us who are just learning and creating for fun.
The Power of Pika (and other AI tools!)
Here’s an example I put together in the course of a few hours, of a trailer for a fake sci fi movie (I wrote about it here). Briefly, I used ChatGPT to create a storyboard for the trailer, used Midjourney to generate the images, used Pika to animate it, created a soundtrack in suno.ai, and used Elevenlabs.io for the voiceover audio.
Not perfect, but amazing for a couple of hours of work!
Pika: the Basics
The Pika platform uses AI models to generate and edit videos. You can generate video from text prompts or input images from photos or created in art programs like Midjourney. Pika can work in various styles, such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon, and cinematic, and makes this video creation more accessible and user-friendly for beginners.
Pika Video AI has been designed to transform your initial concept into a visual story, bringing your creativity to motion, and offers features like video-to-video conversion, as well as enhanced motion and animation quality.
And this is why Pika Video AI has already been described as a game-changer in the world of AI video creation, because of its promise to allow creators of any skill level to unleash all of their creative potential.
Functionally, it is pretty similar to RunwayML, which I discussed here, but it has a far more welcoming free version.
What Makes Pika Video AI Unique From Other AI Models?
Besides the currently unlimited generation capability (with watermark) Pika Video AI includes two unique features and capabilities that makes it stand out from the crowded landscape of other AI-driven video editing tools.
These revolutionary features include:
Diverse Styles
Pika Video AI has the ability to help you to create videos in diverse styles, including anime and cartoon, as well as 3D animation and cinematic, which alone sets it apart from traditional video editing tools. The platform’s AI model understands these styles to allow the user to edit and refine their videos in different ways, like tweaking your content’s dimensions, and altering elements within the video.
User Friendliness
Pika Video AI’s intuitive approach to video editing and production means that anyone — from hobbyists to content creators and professional video editors — will be able to use the platform with ease to edit and refine videos in different ways.
You can approach video generation in a variety of ways, including
- text to video
- image to video
- canvas expansion/image resizing
- easy “add 4 seconds” to clip video extension
There’s absolutely no need for you to have prior video editing experience to get the best out of this amazing AI model.
So, How Do You Use Pika Video AI to Create Video?
As we mentioned above, Pika Video’s AI tool is able to generate videos from your text prompts alone, or you can include a reference image that it will start from. You’ll likely get higher-quality outputs if you use a reference.
You can join through Discord or through Pika’s website.
There was a waitlist, and there may be waitlists to access new features in the future, but my current understanding is that it is in fully open beta, so go ahead and join!
Prompting Pika
If you’re familiar with initiating Midjourney via your Discord account, then mastering the use of Pika Video AI shouldn’t pose much of a challenge.
In Discord, simply use the /create command to transform your text prompt into vivid videos. On Pika’s site, just enter your prompt in the box, add your image, and animate away!
There are various customization options, including guidance scale, aspect ratio, seed, motion, and camera available, and the AI will generate your videos in real-time.
It’s as simple as that!
Here’s an example, from the Discord:
Here is the prompt:
Dove of peace flying above a volcano, anime style, slow zoom
And this was the result:
Not bad for a minute’s work, although we had to wait a few minutes for our video, due to all the other Discord users playing with the AI model.
Are There Any Downsides?
Of course, as with any new AI model, along with the praise for its diverse video styles, users on Reddit have reported a few common complaints (troublemakers, redditors are!).
Lack of Features
Common issues include the lack of customization options, expanded content libraries to further enhance the creation experience, and the need for additional features and resources.
Of course, it is still in beta, so we’re sure more features will be added! Compared to RunwayML, there are some missing features and image quality issues (720p), but it’s free, and very new.
Copyright Concerns
In addition, and despite the plaudits for its ease of use, innovative features, and the quality of the videos that it produces, the issue of copyright, in relation to the use of AI for video creation, has been raised.
Pika Labs is reportedly working on tools that will filter copyrighted content, although this is still in the exploratory stage.
Strange Outputs
Some of the GANs (generative adversarial networks) that power image and video-generation tools can do magical things with simple, abstract prompts. Midjourney is a good example of this (see my post 26 Incredible Midjourney Single Word Prompts for details).
But Pika.art often produces incoherent, garbled videos when prompted abstractly, often with multiple layers of text from the training data it was fed.
See this one for example:
Prompt: The evolution of an AI landscape
Is Pika Video AI Free?
At present, Pika Video AI is free to use, so all you need to do is sign up to the platform with your Google or Discord credentials in order to use it. It’s safe to assume that there will be a tiered subscription model launched in the future to more features for paying users, but for now, it’s gratis.
You’ll be able to access Pika Video AI through most web browsers on both desktop and mobile platforms, which will make it even more convenient to use for everyone that’s interested in playing with the features this unique AI model has to offer.
Its user-friendly web-based accessibility will ensure that even those without extensive technical expertise can navigate the tool anytime and anywhere, bridging the gap between creativity and technology even further.
If you’re looking for more detailed guidance on how to use Pika Video AI, visit the official Pika Labs website by clicking here. Pika provides extensive official tutorials and documentation on the platform.
Final Thoughts
Pika Video AI is the ideal generative AI video editing tool for people looking to animate images and create AI video.
It blends cutting-edge AI with user-friendly features in a way that already transcends the limitations of traditional video editing tools. And it’s just getting started.
Pika Video AI stands out in the crowded landscape of AI-driven video editing tools because of its ability to produce interesting videos from simple text prompts and images at low cost.
And although some user feedback has suggested where there are areas for improvement, Pika Video AI is a transformative AI tool that is heralding a new era of creativity where anyone can unlock their potential through the fusion of AI and video production — whether you’re a beginner or a content creator or artist with more advanced skills.
