A product video will showcase a product in its most amazing glory. It will highlight its features, tout the main selling points and also a trigger an emotion response. These videos can cost millions of dollars to make, or cost almost nothing. We see them during the most watched events on TV like the Super Bowl, or on the most obscure listings on Amazon.
And for most of its history, which probably parallels the history of television, the product video had to be shot with a film or video camera. But has AI caused a seismic change in how we make product videos.
With the rise of AI, do we still need to shoot product videos the “traditional” way?
We’ve already been leveraging AI to augment our regular productions including product commercials. We’ve also produced several commercials that are entirely AI, but for service businesses.
As an experiment to see if we could produce an entire product video with AI, we ran a few tests with a generic toy truck that I borrowed from my son’s collection.
Here are the reference pictures of the truck that I took with my iPhone.
Product Features Highlight Video
For the first test, we tried a straight-forward features highlight video. Here’s the result of the first generation:
The prompt included an “exciting fast-paced hip-hop song” but it delivered a slow-jam. The words, “PL Truck” was also supposed to appear on screen but it generated a voiceover instead.
We made a slight adjustment to the prompt and tried again:
The music was slightly better but still not upbeat enough. Words appeared on-screen this time rather than as a voiceover, but the letters were off.
We tried the features video one more time:
The music had the beat we wanted but it added gibberish vocals. The text was still off.
Product Videos with an Emotional Connection
Continuing on with our test, we wanted to try a concept with a story and more of an emotional appeal. Here were the results:
This animation version turned out better than we thought it would. This version would require a few additional generations to get it right, but the overall idea came through.
The other two versions below also turned out well. If this was a client project, we would definitely run a few versions and probably edit them together, but the concept was addressed and the physics weren’t weird.
Conclusion: Yes, GenAI can do Product Videos
Overall, within a few years, we anticipate that most product videos would be produced with AI. All you would need are photographs to get started. As of now, there are still a few things that would require manual tweaking. For example, music and sound design may have to be done separately. Also, AI still hasn’t fully grasped the generation of typography and text animation. We also anticipate that for a product that is complex (more than our toy truck), several more generations will be needed as well as manual changes even with a wide portfolio of reference pictures.
But overall, product videos generated with AI are certainly in the near future.
Picturelab, a full-service video production company, produces commercial-quality product videos both traditionally and with GenAI. We are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Orange/Los Angeles counties, with reach all over the world. Contact us to learn how we can help with your brand’s product videos.