One of the most amazing AI tools I’ve seen in years of covering the field is OpenAI’s Sora, but so far, only a small number of experienced creatives have been granted access.
Numerous remarkable videos have been shown to us, ranging from an astronaut documentary to a music video with raindrops. Even a brief film depicting a man with a balloon head has been shown to us.
Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI Mira Muratti says that we should be able to use Sora sometime this year, but she cautions that may not be the case if the business is unable to address security concerns with the model by November.
There are already Sora substitutes available-
You can experiment with a variety of clips, styles, and material created by these incredible AI video tools while you wait for Sora. Among these substitutes for Sora are Pika Labs and Runway etc.
1 .Runway-One of the major participants in this market is Runway. Runway had some of the most amazing and lifelike generative video output before OpenAI unveiled Sora, and it still is.
prompt-A dense waterfall surrounded by lush greenery.
video credit-Runway
Runway was the first company to release a synthetic video model for sale, and in the last year, the company has improved and added new features. This features a significant improvement in the Gen-2 model’s quality and motion consistency from Sora’s initial reveal.
The most notable feature is the remarkably realistic lip-synching from an image, which even manages to animate the movements of the head and eyes to increase the realism. You can record or upload your own voice or use ElevenLabs’ synthetic voices with this.
One of Runway’s unique features is Motion Brush, which lets you pick a certain area of a video and animate just that portion, or pick many areas and animate them separately.
2.Pika Labs-Alongside Runway, Pika Labs is one of the two main participants in the generative AI video market. Its Pika 1.0 model can record videos from text, photos, or other videos. It can also play back videos for up to 12 seconds, albeit the longer the film, the less smoothly it plays.
Pika made a big splash when it launched last year, revealing a cartoon version of Elon Musk along with an amazing feature called inpainting that lets you alter or animate a certain area of a video.
Pika Labs provides precise motion control in the video together with negative prompting. It also includes lip-syncing sound effects that are either incorporated based on a text prompt or matched to the video.
prompt-In the scorching summer, a bird searches desperately for water. With its usual sources depleted, it embarks on a perilous journey to find relief. Facing predators and harsh conditions, it persists until finally discovering an oasis, quenching its thirst and finding hope amidst adversity.
video credit-pika labs
Lip synchronization from Alongside Runway, Pika Labs is one of the two main participants in the generative AI video market. Its Pika 1.0 model can record videos from text, photos, or other videos. It can also play back videos for up to 12 seconds, albeit the longer the film, the less smoothly it plays.
Video clip can have Pika Labs added to it. That way, you could have it make a movie out of, say, a Midjourney picture, then have its lips move and give it a voice. Alternatively, you can animate action figurines, like I did in an experiment.
3.STABLE VIDEO-One of the better implementations, Stable Video, is presently in closed beta and was built by StabilityAI on top of Stable Video Diffusion. It’s also one of the few SVD platforms that lets you adjust the motion precisely instead of merely defining the motion magnitude.
prompt-Abhishek’s heart yearns for the mysterious girl
video credit-stable vide0
You may set the camera to shake or locked, define an aspect ratio or style, and generate from text or an image. Additional camera motion controls are also programmable. Four options are presented by Stable Video as an initial image to animate when you produce from text.
4.FINALFRAME-This is a bit of a dark horse in the AI video space with some interesting features. A relatively small bootstrapped company, FinalFrame comfortably competes in terms of quality and features with the likes of Pika Labs and Runway, building out to a “total platform.”
The name stems from the fact FinalFrame builds the next clip based on the final frame of the previous video, improving consistency across longer video generations. You can generate or import a clip, then drop it on to the timeline to create a follow on, or to build a full production.
FinalFrame AI explorations with pinks and blues 💖 pic.twitter.com/QGcZdAlzTx
— Kiri (@Kyrannio) March 16, 2024
The startup recently added lip syncing and sound effects for certain users, including an audio track in the timeline view to add those sounds to your videos.
5.LTX STUDIO-Unlike the others, this is a full generative content platform, able to create a multishot, multiscene video from a text prompt. LTX Studio has images, video, voice-over, music and sound effects; it can generate all of the above at the same time.
The layout is more like a storyboard than the usual prompt box and video player of the other platforms. When you generate video, LTX Studio lets you go in and adapt any single element, including changing the camera angle or pulling in an image to animate from an external application.
@gizakdag A kid finds a super shiny, big and red magical strawberry in the woods. After eating it, she starts turning into a red astronaut and fly up, zooming over the town happily. pic.twitter.com/sklrCm3zbU
— LTX Studio (@LTXStudio) February 28, 2024
I don’t find LTX Studio handles motion as well as Runway or Stable Video, often generating unsightly blurring or warping, but those are issues the others have started to resolve and something LTX Studio owner Lightricks will tackle over time. It also doesn’t have lip sync, but that is likely to come at some point in the future.