Pictory: AI Corporate Text-to-Video

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

New editions every Saturday.

Each will contain four sections:

• Problem: What was I trying to solve when I found this tool?
• Process: What was it like to use this tool?
• Result: The reveal of the final asset!
• Rating: My honest opinion.

Let's get started:

PROBLEM

I care deeply about my LinkedIn. It's a problem. And I know native video uploads do well on LinkedIn. So I wanted to find an AI tool that can turn my writing into videos that will be additive to my current content mix.

PROCESS

Pictory (<- affiliate link that supports this newsletter) came up in conversations within digital media circles almost every time I mentioned AI video.

True generative video is full of warped faces and uncanny-valley physics.

But Pictory is more of an AI editor, stock videography (integration with Getty Images ), music selector, and uses ElevenLabs for generative narration, it can create a pretty elegant video by simply uploading a script.

And that script could be my LinkedIn posts.

Bingo.

From the main screen I selected 'Script to Video', copy/pasted the text from a recent post about the health and wellness market, chose from one of their many beautiful 'text over stock' templates, and started generating.

In about 90 seconds, my assembly was ready! A full 2.5 minute video with my script over text.

So fast! And it worked!

Well...kind of.

I noticed a lot of the sentence chunks selected a stock video that focused on the 'nouns' of the statement rather than the context.

For example, every time money was mentioned in a statement, regardless of context, there would be a video of money falling from the sky or a stock ticker.

Of the 24 'scenes' created (what Pictory calls each chunk of text and voice over video) I had to replace 18.

Not great.

But it was so easy to replace videos.

A simple search function shows a variety of great stock videos, though full of a lot of the same 'cheese' as all stock videos.

Lots of business people high-fiving, a Gen Z girl texting, a group of teens laughing, and piles of pills swished around by latex-gloved hand.

The voice over was okay, though this is more of a function of ElevenLabs than Pictory so this will not effect my rating.

You can definitely tell it's a robot, but it is infinitely better than three months ago and I'm confident it will be better three months from now.

But God help you if you make a typo, as I did with the word 'academic' as you will see below. The voice-over is unforgiving and will be happy to pronounce it incorrectly just to rub it in.

All-in, the entire process from text import to final result took about 10 minutes, and now that I understand the process the next one should take me closer to 5.

Pretty impressive for a cohesive 2 minute video!

RESULT

Without further ado, my LinkedIn post in video form with Pictory:

RATING

I love how simple it was to use, but its lack of understanding context is pretty annoying. I'd love to hear the voices get a bit better (again, ElevenLabs' problem more than Pictory), the video stock selection AI improve, the pacing get better (it's really hard to time it so you can read everything unless the sentence is exactly the right length), and the format be a bit more variable as 'text over stock' can feel tedious at times.

I can see myself using this for quick edit jobs, but it's not ready for premium video yet.

That's why Pictory gets 6 Evil Robot Overlords out of 10. Cool party trick, but not one that I will integrate into my daily workflow.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe so you never miss an issue!

About the Author

Phil Ranta, is the COO of?We Are Verified, a digital talent management and influencer marketing company. 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.

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

TikTok