Imagine App: AI Music Videos

This is Generative Phil, where I try new AI tools to solve one of my real problems and give it a rating between 1 - 10 Evil Robot Overlords (10, of course, being so essential it's a little scary).

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Music is the star of modern social media.

I want to make music videos but I can't dance nor can I sing. I need AI to help.

Enter imagineapp.co , which promises to make an amazing music video in less than 10 minutes.

Let's get started.

PROBLEM

Deft use of TikTok trending audio is the ultimate growth hack.

Musicians have more ways to find distribution than ever before.

The problem: they need great visuals.

We're not in the radio-age anymore.

So how do I use AI to up my music video game without spending $50k on a full creative crew?

PROCESS

Before I start, an admission: my friend Jon Redick put me in touch with imagineapp.co 's Ming Yong who whitelisted my account and gave me credits to try it out for this review. Thanks guys and Ming, Go Blue!

That being said, this won't be a 'starting from zero', free-account kind of review.

As I do a simple Google sign-in, I see I have been blessed with 2550 credits.

There's a handful of options on the main page that 'cost' 5 credits per second including image-to-video, text-to-video, and transform-a-video.

But I'm here for music videos! So I click on 'Make Music Video' at the top.

I pop into a new project and I'm presented with a few more options.

I'm no musician, so I borrow a copyright-free track from FreePD called 'Footsteps in the Attic.'. No lyrics required!

This is an objectively spooky track, so I describe my MV (music video) accordingly:

Time to create the story! Button tapped!

Aaand I need to do lyrics, with big red 'Required' text underneath. Bummer since not all music has lyrics, but I'll play along.

I type the words 'Footsteps in the Attic' into a Word doc, save, and try to upload.

Error.

Needs to be an srt or lrc file.

Thank goodness I'm an avid podcaster and know Riverside.fm has a free srt-creating transcription tool!

I pop the lyricless song into their tool and create a blank srt, upload it, and create the story.

A message tells me to wait 15 minutes, so I start the countdown.

A few minutes later, a series of prompts pop up with time codes! They look great, so I hit 'create keyframes' to generate the short videos corresponding to each prompt.

After about 45 minutes of spinning wheels, I figured it was stuck. I reloaded and voila! The pics were there! They look great so I hit 'Generate Clips'.

More spinning wheels. Another 10 minutes and the videos pop up!

I hit 'Finalize Video'! More spinning wheels. But I'm sure this is the last step. And a few minutes later:

RESULTS

It popped up! Downloaded the .mp4 at 720p resolution (4k was an option at 37 credits), and uploaded it to my YouTube.

Here's the result:

RATING

For starters, this is the only product I've reviewed that's a pre-launch beta and I want to make sure I'm not judging this as a public product.

The promise of a new music video in 10 minutes certainly wasn't my case, where total rendering for the 55-second piece took approximately one hour (may have been faster if the spinning wheels were belying the actual progress). But the time I had to spend entering prompts and reviewing assets was around 10 minutes.

The SRT transcription requirement is frustrating. Not only because it's a difficult file type for most regular folks to make, but we are in a golden age of lyricless music, especially on social platforms that love 'Lofi Girl'-style content.

But I found the quality and cohesiveness of the video to be exceptional. The imagery matched the creepy oil-painting vibe I requested, and the running throughline of footsteps that matched the title of my song was a cool touch.

I watched a handful of other videos created by the technology and was equally impressed. I could imagine all of these videos on 90's MTV as actual music videos.

That's why I'm giving imagineapp.co seven Evil Robot Overlords out of ten. Incredibly impressive, and with a few bug tweaks, the ability to continue the same character in multiple clips to tie together the narrative, ditching the SRT requirement, and a bit more refinement in the generated photos and videos, this could be a game-changer.

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And if you have pitches for what tech you'd like me to cover next, let me know in the comments.

About the Author

Phil Ranta, is the CEO of Spree , a shoppable video platform and media company focused on health and wellness creators and brands. A 2021 LinkedIn Top Voice in Innovation & Tech , Phil has been creating content for the Internet and building Internet businesses professionally for nearly 20 years, starting on MySpace and riding trends to the present. He was the Head of Gaming Creators, North America at Facebook, the first network lead at Fullscreen, the COO at Studio71, and spent 10 years as a working comedian (including 2 years on cruise ships). He's a husband, a dad of two littles, and an insufferable digital media wonk.

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