EP 66: Runway 101 - Create stunning video in seconds

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Can you create videos in seconds that are actually high quality? The answer is yes, you absolutely can. That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today on Everyday AI. My name's Jordan Wilson. I'm your host. And today it's me and you chatting. And we're going to learn how you can use this tool called Runway. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe you haven't, but how you can literally use text inputs, photo inputs, and create pretty amazing results in seconds. So if you're new to Everyday AI, this is your daily livestream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and like me not just understand what's going on in the world of AI, because there's always a lot, but how we can actually use it, how we can apply it in our everyday lives. So that's also what today's show is about. So if you are joining us live, please drop a comment. If you are listening on the podcast, you know that comes out every day on Spotify, Apple, all those of your favorite platforms, check the show notes. There is a link where you can come and you can leave a comment about this or you can just join us during the weekday. So. All right, cool. We have Vernon joining us. Vernon, excellent. Yes, excellent. Thanks for joining. All right, so before we talk about Runway, and I think you're going to want to pay attention to today's show, let's first talk about what's going on in the world of AI news and some, some, some headlines today. So Amazon Web Services, AWS powering so much of generative AI, has just released just a bunch of new free and paid courses on AI. So we will link to those in our newsletter. But this, it's a pretty interesting move from, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, a lot of these other big companies are putting out way more kind of free education and free training on AI than they would on hardly any other areas just because I think they really want people to adapt to this technology. Next next news piece today is Netflix is making waves with a recent job posting, but maybe not in the way that they intended. So amid all of the actor strikes that are going on here in the US the writers kind of can't get on the same page with the Hollywood studios. But Netflix posted a $900,000 job for AI. So as you know, movie studios are grappling and Actors are grappling with how do we find the common ground? That may come off as kind of a slap in the face to some of that industry, but if you're looking for a $900,000 AI job, might be worth checking out. All right, last news piece before we get into talking about Runway is a new study shows that more than 70% of companies are experimenting with generative AI. 70% of companies is a ton. But so far, results are showing that few companies are actually investing money in it. So just really things are going in the starting with the experimentation phase and slowly going into implementation. So this, this study just shows that, you know, companies are struggling with how they can actually use AI in their day to day. But that's what you have everyday AI for. That's what we do here on this show. That's what we're going to be talking about today. All right, so we have a lot of comments already. Great. It looks like people are excited to learn about Runway. George saying, looking forward to helping our marketing team creating cool safety videos. Yeah, let's do it. We'll talk about it. George, thanks for joining us. Dr. Harvey Castro, thanks for being here. May Britt, super curious to learn more about Runway. I'm curious to show you guys. Keyshan saying, welcome. Thank you for joining us. A lot of people joining us today. This is great. Maurice, thank you for joining us. Brian joining us as from from South Mississippi. All right, so, and, and Leonard, Leonard joining us as well. Leonard posts really cool things on, on LinkedIn about, you know, AI image generation. So make sure to check him out. All right, let's talk to it. Let's get straight to it. So we're actually going to start at the end. Okay, we're going to start at the end and I'll kind of explain, explain why. So let's first go over a quick, quick overview of what Runway is. All right, so I have my screen here. I was just kind of playing around with it right before the show. So here's what Runway is. All right. And hopefully, and hopefully you all can see see the screen here. But if you are listening on the podcast, this is one of those shows that's going to be best to see the video. I'm going to do my best to explain what's going on in the screen and how you can take advantage of this tool called Runway. But click on the show notes. You know, this is one where it's just going to be best to watch it, but I'm going to do my best. So Runway, in short, is a new ish AI kind of generative AI tool. And it does everything that you can think of as it pertains to video. Even as myself, I was, you know, I've edited. Oh gosh, I should have counted before the show. But I've spent thousands of hours editing videos. You know, in, in my former former lives, both as a journalist and as, you know, kind of a nonprofit executive where we were working with, with Nike and Jordan Brand, I would be editing videos, you know, that we would, you know, show to Nike and Jordan Brand all the time. Thousands of hours. I wish that I had a tool like Runway back, back in the day. Would have saved so much time. So let's, let's go over a super high overview, high level overview of Runway and what you can do. So you'll see that there's kind of on the screen a lot of different tools that are built in. Also, it's important to note there is a free version of Runway, but I believe everything that you generate will have a watermark. So it's, which is good. It's free to explore this, this tool, see if it's, if it's right for you. Also, this is a big player, right? So Runway recently raised $141 million and right now they're valued at 1.5 billion, right? And it is some of the biggest names in tech that have invested in them. So Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, there's a host of others. But you know, really, I think a tool that we don't talk about enough and people aren't using enough. And that's one of the reasons why we're going over it on today's show. So a couple of things that you can do, but you can do text to video, which we're going to show you, right? Pretty amazing. I think a lot of us have heard of, you know, text to image, you know, with tools like Mid Journey, Dall E from OpenAI, stable diffusion. But text to video, we're going to go into it, removing background from video, right? Video to video, text to image, you know, which again, so many companies do that image to image. You know, you can train your own generator. There's, there's so many different video, video editing, generative AI tools in Runway. We can't go over them all in a 15 to 20 minutes live stream here. But I want to show you, I want to show you all one of the newer features that's grabbing a lot of headlines. So essentially to get on with the Runway speak, you have Gen 1 and Gen 2. Right. So they had a host of tools that they released as Gen1 and then they have a host of tools they released with Gen 2. So we're going to be going over Gen 2 today, which is videos, right. Generating videos from text and images. So let's, let's get right into it. And just as a reminder, if you do have any questions, please feel free to pop them in a chat in the chat here. So like Audrey saying, wow, video to video. Yes. And make sure to check out Audrey. She's going to be on the show this week. So let's, let's just do it live. Let's do it. So you know, we've obviously played around with this a little bit. The Gen 2 has, was just recently released to the public, so it is a newer tool. But let's just start with the basics here. So this is a blank screen, right? And it's saying add an image or write a prompt or use both. And that's it. This is one of the simplest interfaces, but I'm going to go ahead and I have a little thing, a little prompt here on the screen. Very simple, just so you don't have to watch me struggle typing. Okay, so you'll see there, I just typed in my prompt and I hit generate. All right. And my prompt was simple. It says the Chicago skyline at sunset as if shot from a drone on the lakeshore. Okay. Pretty simple stuff. So as this buffers, let me explain kind of how this works. So there's a lot of computing power going on here, right? If someone would have told me, as a video editor capturing video, like I said, I spent thousands of hours doing this. If you would have told me 10 years ago that you could do this with just simple text, I would not have believed you. But we are seeing it live here. It's going to generate in seconds. Depending on, I think the load on their servers, it might take like a minute. Ish. But for the most part in our testing, you can get some great results in less than a minute. So as this kind of finishes generating and we're done. All right, so this is pretty shocking, right? So yeah, if, if you're watching this, you understand, but if you're not watching this, it's a very gorgeous looking Chicago sunset. Right. Granted, it looks like some of the buildings aren't laid out how they should be. Right. So again, this gen 2 was just, just released recently to the public, so there will be improvements in their models, in their engine. But I'm going to go ahead and hit play and we're going to take a look at this.

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Wow. So super, super smooth. So a couple of things to note for now and these things change. So if you're listening to this on the podcast in a couple of weeks or in a couple of months, go back and check. But let's take a look at some of the settings right now and talk about some of the limitations and options. Right, so there's the option. By default it's check to interpolate, which is to smooth out your frames. You can upscale. So this resolution here is not the highest resolution, so you can export it in hd, but for the sake of time, I'm not doing that. And then also like I said, if you're on the free plan, it will have a watermark. I'm not on the free plan, so you won't see a watermark here. But those are the main options that you have. And right now the duration is currently set to four seconds. Presumably that is going to change as their servers kind of catch up and they can produce a little bit more and as the quality increases. But that's what, you know, machine learning and AI is all about. You get, you get feedback from users. Right? So right here I'm going to go ahead and leave them feedback. I'm going to say a 4 and you know, they're even going to ask how can we do it better next time? So I'm just going to say render quality. Right? So over time this is going to get better as users like you and me tell them, hey, this is good. This isn't. All right, so let's, that's one example of just, you saw it here live creating a pretty good looking video from just a text prompt. All right, so we do have a couple of, couple of questions. All right. Our YouTube's working. All right, so PJ, thank you for the question. I know PJ sometimes joins on LinkedIn, so thanks for joining today on YouTube. Thanks. Now we know it works. PJ, so she has a question. How does this compare to midjourney? I'd say completely different tools. So there's very small overlap in that Runway does offer text to image, but Midjourney is far superior in that. So if you don't know midjourney, I'm actually going to be bringing in a mid journey image and we're going to be testing that. But midjourney is probably one of the most popular text to image generators and you can get amazing results from midjourney. Results that you can use in your marketing and you can use to grow your business. Right. These are all, you know, even when we talked in the, at the top of the show about, you know, so many companies are experimenting with generative AI, but few are able to really take advantage. This is a way you can take advantage, right? Think of your, your small business. You know, if you work at a company, if you have a small marketing department or if you don't have budget, you can use this kind of tool to produce just great results. Couple couple other questions coming in. How can it help us edit videos made by ourselves? So great, great question. So you can go in and look at all the different, at all the different options that Runway has for video editing. I just really touched on the basics, you know, removing backgrounds. I know they have some colorization options. There's, there's so many different video editing tips. But this isn't your traditional timeline video editor. If that's, if that's what you're kind of going for. There's other AI powered softwares or non AI. So you know, if you want to replace, you know, Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, this isn't it. This is actually, I'd say jaw dropping, right. I never like to, you know, overdo it here on the show, but these are great results. The fact that you can get this is amazing. So yeah, it's not, not technically your traditional timeline video editing right now. This is for producing short clip. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of people are saying wow. Impressive. Agree. Eve, thank you for joining us. Val, thank you. For joining us. Good morning to you all as well. All right, let's, let's quickly take another look at a use case here. So I'm going to go ahead and we're going to go back into Gen 2 and here's what we're going to do. You can use an image. You can start with an image. All right, so you might already see it there, but I'm going to show you. You can just drag and drop something on your screen. We're going to do it live. So this is an image from midjourney, and you can kind of see it in the background there. So this is something. Every Friday we put together a little recap of what's going on in the world of AI news. We share it on LinkedIn. But for each kind of big news piece, we share an image generated with Mid Journey. This is one of our Mid Journey images. I think this was about the ongoing battle between Hollywood and the Writers Guild. So, you know, the, the strike with the actors. This was one of the images that we used. So it's, it's kind of generating here. And I'm actually going to take this, take this opportunity here to show you some examples. All right, so let's go ahead and go to Twitter. Right, so shout out to whoever shared this. Let's see who it is. Curious refuge, I believe. So this is in a galaxy far, far away. An example, you know, so this is playing here. If you're not. Oh, let me make sure that we have the right tab on. There we go. All right, so if you are listening on the podcast, you are seeing some Star wars themed. It looks like a movie trailer if you didn't know any better. Right. So highly detailed photos that were created with AI images turned into videos. So this looks like it could be a spin off series of Star wars or something. You know, all these, you know, kind of big series have, you know, smaller shows on, on Netflix, you know, things like that. This looks like it's a spin off of, of a Star wars show, but this is all created with Runway. So, you know, again, maybe you're seeing some of these examples and you're like, all right, I don't get it. You know, here's a short four second clip. What can I do with it? Well, there's a great example of what you can do with it, right? The possibilities are endless, especially when you have AI generated images. You can go from text to high quality image to a short video montage like that in minutes. Right? So let's, let's go Back in and let's check on, let's check on our, our video. So again we use this for our, for our kind of week weekly news recap. So let's go ahead and hit play. As you'll see here, it's a, it's a Terminator esque looking bot there in, in Hollywood and there's you know, people in the background walking. So let's hit play. So again, not too bad. You know, you kind of see people walking in the background, the Terminator type robots moving around a little bit. You have clouds moving in the background. So again, this isn't going to give you a video that you can just use on its own in four seconds. You know, a four second clip. You're not going to do anything with it. But like that example showed, you know, when you splice them together you can really create something, something really valuable. I think there's a lot of value in this. All right, let's, let's take one more look at another example on Twitter. So let's go ahead and again we'll have this in the, in the newsletter, in the free newsletter. So make sure you go sign up at your everyday AI.com. so if you wanted to see more of these examples, we're going to have them. So this is from a Twitter user, Creative Edge. So always, always want to shout out the people that put this together. So on the left you'll see the AI image that was created in mid journey. On the right you'll see the Gen 2 video that was created in Runway. Right. So let's go ahead and take a look here. So the great thing, this is also really good. If you can get high quality images of people right in mid journey, in stable diffusion, in Dall E, in all these different text to image generators, you can get some pretty impressive results with Runway. So let's just go ahead and take a look at these. So you know, great lighting changes, you know, you get some facial expressions of the kind of actors or the AI actors, you know, walking through a store seeing movement. So yeah, you can see it there. It's pretty impressive. All right, I hope this was helpful. Now let me just quickly, quickly recap here because we're, we're 20 minutes in. We went over a lot in, in Runway. So let's do a quick recap and if you do have any questions, drop them now before we close out today's show. So we have Gen 2 I think is going to change marketing, right? You saw some of these examples and there's another great one that, that we'll make sure to share in the newsletter today. It was kind of a bar Barbeheimer, like whatever that that that word is combining the two popular movies. It was an AI generated trailer that combined Barbie and Oppenheimer. It was amazing, right? So there's so many different use cases that you can use Runway for. So again, what we Talked about today, Gen 2, text to video, we showed you, put in a text prompt, kick something out and then also image to video. You know, another thing that I don't think people are talking about or really even sharing about is using your own photos, right? So let's say you had a vacation and you know, from years ago and you have all these photos. You know, my wife and I were talking about this the other day. It's like we have all these photos but when do we actually look at them? When do we actually use them, right? So to bring old family memories or vacations to life and going from a still image to a video, you know. You know, think of it like, you know, when Apple introduced Live photo, right? That's always fun to go back if you took a live photo, you know, to click it and you can see it. But what about for all those times you didn't? Or maybe you have a, you know, dslr, DSLR camera like I do. You know, you have all these great photos. You can upload these now and get images and to get movements. Because I think that's going to be a common question or even a common complaint with, with something like Runway is, hey, you know, it kind of looks, you know, a little compute generated or a little AI generated. It does for now, right. So again, keep in mind this gen 2 was just recently released, this text to video and image to video. It was just recently released to the public. The input or I'm sorry, the output will get exponentially better, you know, if, if you look at Mid Journey, right? And the quality of image, of images that have come out of Mid Journey and the improvements in image quality and how real they look now. You know, six to eight months ago they didn't look real. Today they look extremely real. Again, I'm someone, I've taken more than 500,000 photos with a DSLR, right? It is hard for me to tell the difference between a real photo and something that Mid Journey as an example generates. And I think the same, you know, it might take a little longer for video. Video is much more comple. But I think in six to nine months we're going to, we're going to see videos created from Runway that look pretty realistic. Right. And we're already starting to see it. You know, I shared some of those examples, so yaddy saying, love it. Thank you for joining us, Ben. Ben with a comment here. Wow. Chaining AI tools could be super useful. Think about, you know, image to video. Yes. For a caregiver to create a kid friendly video explaining a complex surgery. Absolutely right. There's so many practical use cases that people can tap into this for their business. And Ben, to your comment again, make sure everyone signs up for the newsletter and I'll kind of end with this because that's what we're going to be doing today. We have a daily segment called AI and 5. And Ben, that's what we're going to be doing. We're going to show you how to quickly go from creating with tax a high quality image in mid journey and then how you can generate a video in Runway with that generation. So I hope that was helpful for you all. I hope now you can see the power of this generative AI tool from Runway called Gen2. The possibilities to take text to video and image to video is I think, going to change marketing and advertising. If you think that AI has already changed marketing and advertising, just wait until the, until the technology catches up a little bit. The technology is already fantastic, don't get me wrong. But the output from Runway is going to improve as you go in there, like I showed you live going in there, leaving a star rating and leaving feedback, that's going to improve the output. So I do think that this will fundamentally change the way that we consume media in the near future. You know, we've, we, we've heard from very, very knowledgeable people on the future of AI images and video. You know, you even had the Marvel director saying that he fully expects fully AI videos in the Marvel series within two years. Right. And you know, Marvel already did. I think it was the Secret Invasion kind of trailer was all or the kind of the, the beginning credit scene, I think it is, was all AI generated. So I think that this is going to change how we create media and how we create marketing and advertising and also how we consume it. So if you haven't heard of Runway, I hope this was helpful. And again, as a reminder, please go to your everydayai.com Sign up for our free daily newsletter. We help you keep up with all of the latest news, highlight key software, but most of all, we break down the podcast each day into way more depth and give you actionable tips on how you can use what we talk about to grow your business, so make sure you do that. And as you'll see there on the page, we do have a ChatGPT giveaway ending soon. So six months of the plus version, the $20 a month version, and six private lessons. So thank you for joining us and we hope to see you back tomorrow and every day on Everyday AI. Thanks.

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