This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.

Hypernatural is one of the best new tools for making a short video quickly with AI. You don’t need any video editing skill or experience. Nor do you need to shoot your own video. All you need is a link, some text, or an idea to use as a starting point. It’s not as well-known as splashier AI tools like Runway ML, but it’s more practical.

• Turn any link into a video. Paste in a link to an article, blog post, or newsletter post. Choose a visual style and your preferred AI narrator, and you’ll get a video in your chosen style, ready for editing. Examples: this trailer for my recent post about tools on my desk, and a summary video for my post about AI editing help.
• Turn your audio into video. Upload an interview, podcast episode, or dictated audio. Hypernatural will suggest three of the best clips for you to pick from. (You can override those to pick your own). It then turns the selected audio into a video by generating related images to display alongside your audio. Examples: I generated a video teaser for my post about NotebookLM; and a mini app review.
• Prototype a video.Turn a phrase, raw idea, story, poem, speech or letter into a video, by pasting in some text or a link. You’ll get a draft video for editing within a minute.
• Watch a one-minute video summing up how it works.

What’s unique about Hypernatural

Unlike other tools that simply match text to generic open-source images, Hypernatural generates new images—and now video clips—based on the material you feed it. The AI-generated background video—referred to as b-roll—is customized to match the subject and pace of the AI-generated script.

What I appreciate most about Hypernatural is that it lets me make creative choices throughout the process. In addition to choosing the raw material, I can select the video’s visual style, narration, color palette, transitions, format—vertical, square or horizontal. I can then change any of the images or captions or edit the script to further customize the video. I appreciate having this agency in shaping my AI-aided work. It beats typing in a prompt and hoping for the best.

Hypernatural’s best features

• Pick from dozens of visual styles. Want a cartoon? Prefer photorealistic imagery? Maybe you’d like a hand-drawn style? Hypernatural serves up more than 100 options. Preview thumbnails help you check styles before picking one. (Hopefully preview videos will follow at some point). You can even customize your own style from an image or logo.
• Make a video on your phone. Create videos on iOS or Android. Upload audio or video or paste in a link. The apps help if you prefer organizing/creating/sharing multimedia on your phone.
• Upload your own video clips or images. You can replace AI-generated imagery with your own photos, screenshots, or video clips. That’s what I did for this video about our CUNY entrepreneurial journalism program, using my own collage images.
• Regenerate images you don’t like. If particular AI-generated images on the timeline don’t suit you, the app will generate replacement images. The interface is well-designed and simple.
• Pick whatever format you prefer. Make a horizontal, square, or vertical video. For TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, use a vertical video. Pick horizontal for YouTube, LinkedIn, or to watch on a big screen.
• Generate captions automatically. Auto-generated captions save time. Clear, easy-to-read captions make videos more accessible. They benefit anyone watching without sound.
• Customize your colors. Upload your logo and select color preferences to customize the look of the videos you create with Hypernatural. You can also pick your own color palette for the automatically-generated captions.

Caveats

• High-quality AI image and video rendering require costly computing. Hypernatural doesn’t have unlimited usage plans, so you have to buy AI credits.
  • You can try it for free to make ~10 watermarked videos, each up to 30 seconds long.
  • $12/month billed annually gets you 500 monthly credits. That enables you to make about 25 minutes of video, to eliminate the watermark on your exports, and to choose from 40+ premium AI narrators.
  • $22/month gets you 1500 credits (~75 minutes of video) and a shared workspace for collaboration.
  • Hiring an editor to make a single video can cost hundreds of dollars, so this may be an affordable alternative for those experimenting with video on a limited budget.
• I’ve created numerous videos with Hypernatural and consistently found the quality good enough to share on my social channels, including LinkedIn and Substack Notes (which I recommend over the chaotic X/Twitter).
  • Depending on a video’s subject matter, length, and image style, I sometimes encounter background images that don’t match my expectations. Fortunately, I can delete, replace, or adjust them.
  • Don’t expect a 100% perfect output every time. I usually tweak at least a few elements. I like that I can make those nuanced adjustments. With other tools, like Runway ML, the fallback is to start over with a new prompt if a generated clip doesn’t work, like my recent failed Runway ML attempt.
• Free account exports are limited to 30 seconds. If you have a paid account you can create longer pieces. For lengthy projects, consider pro video editing tools like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, which are beginning to incorporate AI capabilities, or online tools like Kapwing (see alternatives below).

Alternative AI video apps worth a look

• Consider Captions to add special effects to videos or dub them in multiple languages.
  • Captions’ new AI edit feature can transform a talking head video into a dynamic, engaging piece with special effects. I uploaded a video recorded directly into a phone camera. Captions AI enhanced it significantly by overlaying not just the words spoken, but graphics to make the video more engaging. I used the desktop app to translate my videos by cloning my voice. Check out how my voice sounds in English????, then translated & cloned into Italian, Japanese, German, and Hindi. Read more about what Captions is best at.
  • Captions AI can also create a video with an avatar speaking on your behalf about material it generates from a link to your site. That can be helpful for those who prefer not to appear on camera.
  • Pricing: $65/year for AI features; $225 for newest AI capabilities, including AI avatar videos and advanced AI editing.
• Consider Kapwing for advanced video editing features.
  • For repurposing a long Zoom video of an interview, panel discussion, or any meeting, Kapwing excels with its repurposed studio. It recommends several short clips you can extract from your original video to share internally or post online. You can adjust the suggested starting and ending points of these clips. Read more about why I love this feature, and see it in action.
  • Pricing: Free for basic editing of 720p videos up to four minutes long, with watermarked exports. $16/month billed annually for higher-quality videos up to 120 minutes with AI features. $50/month for business usage with voice cloning, lip syncing and more advanced AI features.
• Consider Descript for advanced AI features for repurposing videos.
  • Descript’s new “Underlord” feature significantly improves its AI capabilities. It generates time-saving Youtube descriptions, chapters and titles, plus drafts of social media posts.
  • I’ve written about how great Descript is at letting you edit a video by editing its text. It also has the best background noise removal features I’ve tried. With the AI’s newly-improved capabilities it can: create a short highlight video from a longer video; center the active speaker in an edit; draft a blog post based on your video; remove a video’s background; enhance eye-contact, giving the impression you’re looking straight into the camera.
  • Pricing: Limited free plan, then $12/month billed annually for 20 uses/month of AI features, $24/month for unlimited use of AI features. Discounts for nonprofits and education.
• Consider Runway ML to make cinematic 10-second clips.
  • Runway ML’s new video AI generator, Gen-3 Alpha, is remarkable. It’s the closest tool to OpenAI’s much-anticipated Sora, which isn’t yet publicly available. It’s simple to use, but hard to use well. Type in a detailed prompt, specifying a camera’s movement, angle, lighting, and more, and get back a five or 10-second clip. The prompting guide is excellent and talented creators have made stunning work with it, like the winning pieces in the 2024 AI Film Festival.
  • Caveat: it’s challenging to get the results you want from a single-shot prompt — (witness my failed attempt). And it’s expensive: my $15/month subscription only gets me a handful of 10-second video attempts. Once you generate a clip, you have limited options for editing it, unlike Hypernatural or other tools.
    

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.