Meta presents “Movie Gen” to create short videos from text prompts – no training, skills or expensive equipment required

Future-oriented: Advances in AI seek to eliminate many of the prohibitive financial and technical challenges that can make content creation more difficult outside of large cloud data centers. AI research teams are developing and refining tools that enable even the most novice creators to generate content based solely on a description of what they want to see. This week, Meta published a blog post highlighting Movie Gen, the company's upcoming text-to-content audio and video generator.

Movie Gen was featured by Mark Zuckerberg this week in an Instagram post reminding us that we shouldn't skip leg day. The preview comes several months after OpenAI launched text-to-video solution Sora AI.

A longer and more informative announcement was posted on Meta's AI research team blog, providing additional information about Movie Gen's capabilities. The new tool supports text-based video and audio generation and editing functions.

The post includes several videos that demonstrate Movie Gen's ability to easily create and modify content based on a user's text input, producing video content up to 16 seconds in length at a rate of 16 frames per second. The tool can also create highly personalized videos from a single photo combined with a descriptive text prompt.

In addition to video editing, Meta's AI solution can also generate ambient sounds, background music and sound effects to accompany generated or pre-created videos. Similar to its video generation capabilities, Movie Gen's audio generation is also controlled by custom text input.

The post shows several examples of its audio features, including an ATV driving through sand dunes, a skateboarder rolling through a skate park, and penguins swimming through an AI-generated body of water full of large floating balls.

Although Zuckerberg claimed in his post that the new feature could be available to Instagram users next year, a Threads post from Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox clarified the current status of Movie Gen. Cox explained that Meta is listening to feedback from Filmmakers and video creators are taken into account to prioritize features such as improved editing capabilities and the ability to create videos with a specific character or image.

While the preview seems to show that Movie Gen already offers these features, Cox mentioned that the team isn't ready to release them as a product yet. According to him, “It’s still expensive and the generation time is too long – but we wanted to share where we stand as the results are pretty impressive.”