A music video helps you promote your music on YouTube and social networks and reach a wider audience. There are many different routes to your own music video. If it needs to be quick and affordable, or if you’re after a particular look, AI tools can help. In this article you’ll find out which ones are available and how to use them. If you’re interested in music video production in general, you’ll learn more in the blog article “How to Create Your Own Music Video for Yourself or Your Band.
How AI tools work
Generative AI models (Seedance, Kling or Veo, for example) are used to generate images and videos. They have been trained on billions of text-image and text-video pairs and, much like a small child, have learned to recognise similarities between objects and store them in abstract form. If a dog comes towards us in the street, for example, we can classify it as a dog without ever having seen that particular dog before. We simply know from experience that an animal of that shape and proportion must be a dog. The AI collects similar “knowledge” in what is known as latent space.
The AI doesn’t have to store all the images it was trained on – it only collects abstract information that it can link together. This dramatically reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored and makes it possible to generate new images and videos from combinations of that information.
The actual image generation starts with random noise. During AI training, existing images were overlaid with noise step by step until nothing was recognisable any more. In the process, the AI learned to reverse this and reconstruct clear images from noisy ones. That’s why these tools are called diffusion models. The denoising is steered by your prompt – the text you enter as an instruction. The AI links it to the abstract information in its latent space and steers the denoising towards an image that matches your description. Because the same noise and the same prompt produce a different image depending on the starting value (the seed), you get a new result with every run. With video, the process doesn’t run for a single image but for an entire sequence of frames that has to line up over time.
Equipped with a basic understanding of generative AI, let’s take a look at what the various AI tools can do for music video production.
What generative AI tools can do
AI-generated footage allows you to show images that would take a great deal of effort to produce for real. Imaginative landscapes, elaborate animations or gruesome monsters – you can now create all of this within a few minutes and integrate it into your music videos.
There are several ways to use AI tools for your own music video:
Text-to-video:
This is the typical way of using generative AI. You enter a text prompt describing what should be shown – and the AI generates a video clip from it. You can then use these clips to tell a story or to underpin your music video with matching imagery.
Prompt:
Seedance 2.5, 1080p
STYLE — Cinematic, ARRI Alexa, desaturated cyan-orange palette, volumetric haze, neon spill, fine grain.
CAST — Woman, mid-30s, slim and athletic, long dark hair, pale skin, neutral expression. WARDROBE: floor-length charcoal coat with a high collar.
CONTENT — A woman walks alone through a neon-lit future city at night, moving purposefully through empty streets while huge holograms flicker above her and rain sets in — atmospheric sci-fi tone, deliberate pacing, edited structure.
LOCATION — Megacity at night, empty street canyon between 50-storey glass towers, wet asphalt reflecting cyan-orange neon, floating hologram advertising, light rain, low-lying fog, no passers-by.
SHOTS:
- Wide establishing shot, ground level, static — woman enters frame from the left from behind and walks down the street, coat billowing, towers rising into the darkness, 40mm.
- Medium tracking shot, camera travelling alongside her, profile, buildings beside her, neon light, rain, 50mm.
- Low-angle close-up from knee height, boots crossing a puddle, hem of the coat brushing the lens, hologram light on the fabric, slightly handheld, 75mm.
Image-to-video:
The starting point here isn’t a text prompt alone, but a starting image as well. That image becomes exactly the first image (i.e. frame) of the video – and the AI generates all the following frames according to your prompt. The starting image can of course be AI-generated too. This approach delivers results similar to text-to-video, but gives you more control over the scene.
Fantasy:
Prompt:
Seedance 2.5, 1080p
STYLE — ARRI Alexa 35, anamorphic 2.39:1, 65mm equivalent, high contrast, volumetric haze, golden-hour warmth, film grain.
CAST — Dragon: massive, with deep red scales and dark red wing membranes, horned head, amber eyes, 60-foot wingspan, natural scales, no ornamentation.
SUMMARY — A dragon glides over a medieval castle at dusk; the camera follows its flight path as it banks towards a distant forest and unleashes a torrent of fire over the trees — epic fantasy spectacle, realistic sense of scale, no slow motion.
Open on a wide aerial establishing shot, 65mm anamorphic, locked off high above the castle – the dragon enters frame from the right, beating its wings in a steady rhythm and flying towards the camera.
Cut to a close-up of the dragon’s head and chest from the front, unsteady handheld camera; the eyes narrow, the jaws open, an orange glow builds in its throat.
Cut to a wide, locked-off aerial shot above the forest – the dragon breathes a huge jet of fire downwards, the flames spreading across the treetops like a rolling wave, smoke billowing upwards, embers spraying in all directions.
Starting image:
Real-world scene:
Prompt:
Seedance 2.5, 1080p
STYLE — ARRI Alexa 35, golden-hour warmth, soft grain, natural contrast, volumetric haze from the street lamps.
CAST — Dancer 1: man, late 20s, short dark hair, open, cheerful expression. WARDROBE: loose white linen shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, faded jeans, brown leather boots, silver wristwatch. Dancer 2: woman, late 20s, shoulder-length blonde hair in loose waves. WARDROBE: flowing cream summer dress, bare feet.
SUMMARY — Two dancers move together at dusk on a cobblestone street, the camera gliding alongside them and capturing the fluid partner choreography – spontaneous and warm, human connection through movement.
LOCATIONS — narrow Italian cobblestone street, warm amber street lamps just coming on, stone houses with weathered façades, golden-hour light raking low across the stones, light haze in the air, empty, quiet evening.
Open on a wide shot of the two dancers in the middle of the street, 35mm, her dress blowing in the wind, his hand on her waist. Cut to a medium over-the-shoulder shot as she steps back and extends her arm, 50mm, shallow depth of field, her face lit by the last direct rays of sun, his silhouette sharp in the foreground. Cut to a low-angle close-up of their feet on the cobblestones, 25mm, her bare toes and his boots moving in sync, the stones beneath them textured and uneven. Cut to a wide profile shot, 50mm, the camera gliding to the right as they turn towards each other, backlit by a street lamp, volumetric haze glowing between them, holding in the stillness.
Startbild:
Audio-to-video:
With dedicated AI tools you can generate scenes or even entire videos based on your song. You either describe the content you want yourself, or you let the AI interpret your lyrics. The rhythm of your music can be picked up as well.
Neural frames was used in the example below. This tool generated the prompts largely automatically from the lyrics. You can of course still intervene in the script and the underlying prompts before the video is generated. For songs with several singers, multiple characters can be used.
Video-to-video / transformation:
It is also possible to transform filmed scenes using AI in order to change the style of those shots. The people you filmed can be retained, for example, while the background changes. You can also alter clothing and costumes or the overall look of the video (comic style, medieval, colour looks, weather and lighting, and so on).
This is exactly the effect the musicians of the band apropos were after – we produced several music videos for them at the HOFA-Studios. Take a look at the guitar solo in this music video, where real studio footage and AI-generated scenes are combined:
Now you know the typical ways of using AI in your music video projects. You can of course combine all of these approaches within one project. Once you’ve decided on a route, it’s time to get to work. More on that in the next section.
Want to learn more about music video production?
Then our online course “Music Video Production” is just right for you!
Watch the info video now:
The key steps on the way to your AI music video
There isn’t one single route to an AI music video, but many different ways of integrating generative artificial intelligence into your own projects. Below we answer the most important questions and give you a few ideas and tips on how to make generative AI work for you.
Which tools and programs do I need?
AI images and videos are usually created on specialised platforms – often websites that work on a subscription model.
There are platforms designed specifically for creating AI music videos, such as BeatViz, OpenArt or Neural Frames where you upload your audio file and the tools generate a script along with matching video scenes. That gets you to a complete video quickly while still letting you influence the script and the visuals. So these platforms are a good fit for fully AI-generated videos.
There are also platforms that aren’t designed specifically for music videos but allow AI videos to be created for any purpose. These often offer more options and higher quality for the individual scenes. The individual AI scenes then still have to be assembled with the audio file into a music video afterwards, though. Runway and Artlist are well-known examples.
If you want to generate individual scenes and even mix them with footage you’ve shot yourself, you’ll also need conventional video editing software such as DaVinci Resolve (which has a very comprehensive freeware), Final Cut or Adobe Premiere Pro.
What do AI-generated music videos cost?
On almost all platforms, creating AI-generated content costs credits. Credits are the currency you use to pay for individual tasks on the platform.
You get credits with subscriptions, which can range from €10 to €100 per month. Even with a subscription, the number of credits is usually still limited and only tops up again after a certain time. There are also “pay-as-you-go” models that let you buy credits as a one-off and top them up again as you use them. It’s worth comparing the different payment models and keeping an eye out for special offers.^
How much a video costs generally depends on the quality of the model used, the length of the video and the resolution. At optimum quality (latest model, high resolution), one second of AI video can easily cost €0,30 to €0,40 – and there’s often a minimum clip length of four to five seconds, which can be increased in steps. Older models and lower resolutions, on the other hand, are often considerably cheaper. Bear in mind, too, that you’ll often need several attempts per scene before it matches what you had in mind.
Example calculation: For a song length of 3 minutes 30 seconds (i.e. 210 seconds) and an average of two attempts per scene, the credits for an AI-generated music video will cost between €25 (cheap models) and €150 (expensive models).
Lip sync and instruments
Many conventional music videos feature lip-synced vocals as well as instruments played in sync. This is an area where AI often still reaches its limits. While lip-synced mouth movement can be generated on some platforms and with newer models, it is currently barely possible for an AI to create an instrumentalist who realistically plays the right notes in the right rhythm along to the music. There are various ways to work around this:
- Have a singer generated with matching lip movement and create a video without showing any other instruments.
- Show instruments from a distance, so that the details of a movement or the correct keys, fingerings or strokes aren’t recognisable.
- Generate lots of different variations and pick the one that fits best.
- Use fast cuts and short clips, or show only individual chords, strikes or fingerings.
- Shift and stretch the scenes so that individual strokes or fingerings land on the beat.
- Count on the viewer not spotting playing or timing errors … 😉
Several of these techniques were used in this short clip:
Alternatively, as described above, you can also film a musician and use that footage as the basis for the AI-generated scenes (video-to-video). This involves more effort, but also delivers the best results.
More tips & tricks
Start with images: Generating images is far quicker and cheaper than generating entire video scenes. So start with images, just as you would in conventional video production when you create a storyboard. You can then lay them out on a video timeline in your editing software along with the song and build a script for your music video that way. Once you’re done, use the images as the basis for video generation (image-to-video). The drawback: in film, a scene normally develops over its duration. If you use an image as the start frame, that image often shows the climax of the scene. (Example: a person walking through the frame is visible in neither the start frame nor the end frame.) There are two ways around this. You can either use a video generation tool that allows the scene to be extended, so that you add a few more seconds before the starting image. Or you don’t use the image as a start frame at all, but as a reference for the scene. The AI then sticks to the style but has more freedom in generating the imagery.
Take your time over precise prompts: This tip applies to using AI in general. The better the prompt and the source material, the better the result. So give the algorithm as much background information as possible, such as the age, appearance and mood of the protagonist, or the desired style of the image. Incidentally, a chat AI like ChatGPT or Claude is very good at helping you write prompts.
Use randomness: AI operates with a high degree of randomness. The same prompts, however detailed, will often produce very different results, and the effect of a change in input on the output is difficult to predict. It’s best to live with different results and learn to make the lack of control part of the creative process. Sometimes the results are a positive surprise and enrich your work with completely new ideas.
Get into music video production and use AI as a tool: If you enjoy producing music videos and want to learn more in this field, it’s best to get to grips with the fundamentals. Learn how cameras work, how to set lighting, how scripts and good storylines work, and how to cut and grade videos. And then use the many possibilities AI tools offer to add to your videos creatively.
Ethical and legal aspects
There are a few ethical and legal aspects of using AI that you should keep in mind:
Ethical aspects: Training and using AI models requires a lot of computing power and therefore a lot of energy, water and resources. Alongside the financial side of things, using AI sparingly also makes sense for sustainability reasons. Many AI models have also been trained on music, images and videos collected from the internet – often without the explicit consent of the creators. Bear in mind, too, that AI systems learn from data that can reflect social prejudices. That can lead to discriminatory or unintentionally stereotyped results.
Legal aspects: Familiarise yourself with the applicable legal situation and with the guidelines of platforms such as Instagram, YouTube or TikTok before you publish AI-generated content. Depending on how realistic the generated content is, you may be required to label the use of AI, for example.
Consent from the people shown before you upload: If you upload your own material to AI platforms for processing, everyone shown in it should have given their consent. After all, the platforms may store the uploaded material temporarily or use it for training purposes.
Learn more about music video production
Are you interested in how to create a music video for yourself or your band with simple means?
HOFA-College offers a complete online course on music video production.
In it you’ll learn all the important fundamentals of music video production – from choosing your equipment and designing a music video through to shooting and the finished edit. At the end of the course you can submit your own music video for analysis or edit footage we have shot.
This course is also fully included in the ultimate audio engineering online course, the HOFA AUDIO DIPLOMA.
