First thing’s first…

I am NOT going to tell you that using invideo ai is as simple as typing in a prompt and then it spits out a video so good you’ll make Mr. Beast green with envy when you post it. Instead, I’ll be realistic and say that invideo ai can do a lot of the work required to create certain types of videos, which can give you a head-start and save you time getting to the point of publishing.

How it works

The Prompt

Once you’ve created an account, which can be a free account with no credit card required, the starting point of invideo ai is the prompt screen. Here you’ll find a workflow dropdown and a place to enter a prompt. The workflow selection helps you make sure your prompt covers all the necessary instructions for the type of video you’re creating, including: YouTube Shorts, YouTube Explainer, Recent Events, and Script to Video.

If you choose a workflow, a small form will popup asking you for details specific to the workflow you selected and then use the information you entered to create a complete prompt. For example, if you select YouTube Explainer, the popup will ask you how long you want the video to be. Choosing Recent Events will ask you if you have a link to an article, and choosing Script to Video will give you a box to paste in your exact script.

If you choose to ignore the workflow dropdown and type out all the instructions in the single prompt box instead, make sure you include all the relevant details so the AI isn’t left to figure out what you want and make assumptions that aren’t what you had in mind.

Additional Details

After processing briefly, invideo will give you some options to choose from for your audience, look and feel, and platform. For each of these, you select the option that best fits your vision.

• The audience options will be specific to the topic of your video. For example, if you’re making a video about Florida travel destinations it might give you audience options of “travel enthusiasts”, “Florida residents”, or “general public.” The audience options are usually pretty straight-forward. Select the one that best represents the audience you’re making this video for.

• The look and feel options might include “Minimalist modern”, “professional”, and “crisp.” I have no idea how those three are different or what impact they have on the generated video. The look and feel options are just not clear to me and don’t seem all that different. I just choose one and move on.

• Platform options often include “YouTube”, “LinkedIn”, or “FaceBook.” This is easy: which platform are you making this video for?

The First Draft

The robots inside invideo ai will take a little time to generate your video, which will then show up on your screen. To check it out, just click the play button.

I specifically refer to this as the first draft because, unlike so many others, I do NOT over-hype what invideo ai can do and what you should expect from it. In my opinion, you shouldn’t expect to take the first thing invideo ai generates and publish it.

Call me picky, but I ALWAYS find things I want to change in the script it generated and visuals (video clips or images) that I want to swap out with visuals that better represent what’s being said in the voiceover. Sometimes I want to change the voiceover speaker entirely or the whole style and mood of the video it generated. I watch the ai generated video and ask myself, “If this thing just popped up on my feed and I wasn’t involved in creating it, what would I think of it? Would I watch it or click away at some point?” With that mindset, I change things that I believe would make me like it more and want to keep watching.

The AI Edit box

Right below the video there’s a box where you can enter your editing instruction, click the button, and invideo ai will make the changes. For example: “change the video in scene 1 to a drone shot of a cornfield” or “delete the 2nd scene, it’s not really relevant.”

My experience using the AI edit box has been mixed, but less than ideal. Sometimes it looks like it’s doing something, but I don’t see any changes in the video after it says it’s made the change. Other times, if I’m asking for a change to a specific spot, it doesn’t seem to understand and either edits something else or duplicates a part of the video or something else just as weird.

Based on those experiences, I only use the AI edit box for overall changes – like telling it to incorporate a hook or speed up the pace of the video, or if there isn’t a way to make whatever change I want other than using the AI edit box.

Swapping Images and Videos

Invideo usually does a decent job of finding some relevant images and video clips. But, some of the images and clips it picks are sometimes way off. For example, I made a video about animal facts and it was talking about a cheetah while showing a video clip of a killer whale. The killer whale was discussed in a later scene of the video, but not what you want to see while you’re talking about a cheetah. The thing is, there are plenty of cheetah clips in the invideo ai stock libraries. Why it didn’t pick one of those clips, I just don’t know!

Fortunately, the fix is easy. Just click edit, below the video preview, and an edit screen will pop up showing each clip that was used along with the script and it will highlight the words in the script where the selected clip will be played – that’s pretty awesome! If you just click on the clip you want to change, you can search the stock media library and click whatever clip you want to use instead of the original one.

The stock media library includes assets from iStock, Shutterstock, StoryBlocks, Pexels, and Pixabay. There’s a limit on how many iStock assets you can use per month based on the plan you subscribe to. But, with all those other libraries, there’s a crap-ton of assets to pick from. If you want something really specific that isn’t in any of those libraries, you can upload your own images or video clips too. Maybe you’re doing a video on the invention of the toilet and the stock libraries don’t have a lot of early toilet photographs or portraits of the inventor, but you’ve found those images elsewhere.

Editing the Script

I have to say that the scripts generated by invideo ai have been really accurate and well-written, based on my testing and experimentation. But, I do like to make some changes, especially when it includes things like “Cold open” at the front of the script and that wouldn’t work if I have subtitles turned on.

To edit the script, click the edit button under the video preview and then, when the edit screen pops up (that’s where we just went to swap out images and video clips) click the edit script button at the top left.

Now you’ll see the script broken up into scenes and you can manually edit every word and punctuation mark to your liking. You can also make edits to the titles shown on the screen from this edit script screen.

Changing the voiceover

The only way I’ve found, so far, to make changes to the voiceover is by using the ai edit box that’s right below the video preview. Yes, that’s the same AI edit box I try not to use very much. It might be possible to change the voiceover in the timeline editor, but I have not explored that option.

Timeline Editing

If you want precise editing control, invideo ai has a timeline editor in beta. To enable this feature, you first have to click your profile picture (from anywhere inside invideo ai) and then click settings, and enable beta features.

Now, if you click export under the video preview, you’ll see an export to timeline option which will take you to your video in a timeline editor. As of this writing, the timeline editor seems a bit complicated. The upside is that there appears to be a lot of really specific details you can control. This might be more comfortable for those that are really comfortable with timeline editing and want to make precise edits to the timing and other aspects of the elements in the video.

The Bottom Line

Initially, I was frustrated with invideo ai and irritated with the people who made videos talking about how easy it was to just enter a prompt and have invideo ai create an awesome video for you. I would try what they were saying and the video it generated wasn’t awesome at all. Those over-hyping promoters set my expectations by telling me that all I had to do was enter a prompt and get that awesome video with no editing. I was frustrated that it wasn’t working like it was supposed to.

It turns out that my beef wasn’t really with the invideo ai video generator, it was with the people who were telling me it would create the perfect video with no editing, and make me live longer, make my car get better gas mileage, and so on. Of course invideo ai thinks you’ll want to edit the first draft of the video it produces… otherwise, why would they include the ability to edit via the ai edit box, edit media to swap out images and video clips, the edit script feature to change things in the script, and a beta timeline editor?

Once I spent a little time figuring out the editing options, I realized that invideo ai creates a great first draft and it’s pretty easy within invideo ai, to tweak the script or swap out certain images and videos and get an awesome video a lot faster than if I started from scratch.

For instance, without invideo ai, I can write a script, create a voiceover, go grab a bunch of images and clips, and put it all together in a video editor. If I go to invideo ai and tell it what my idea is, it will write the script, create the voiceover, grab the images and clips, and put it altogether. Now, even if I make some changes to the script and want to replace half of the images and video clips it picked, that’s still a lot less work than finding all the clips for the whole video.

And, if I make a change to the script in invideo ai, it will automatically update the voiceover. If I were making the video without invideo ai, I would have to manually fix the voiceover or recreate it in whatever tool I’m using.

I really like that you can paste in your own script and invideo ai will use it exactly as written. That’s really handy for topics that are very specific or I’ve got something in my head that I want in a certain way and include specific points.

If I’m using invideo ai to create the whole thing, script and all, I like that you can give it a url to reference when it’s coming up with the script. In my experience with generative AI, they all do a much better job at nailing my vision when I give them something specific to reference.