Ep 814: NotebookLM's New Cinematic Shorts: How They work, 5 Tips and 5 Best Use Cases

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life.

Most AI tools at work don't know anything about you. Every time you're stuck re-explaining your projects, your team, what actually matters. Slack just fixed that. The all-new Slack Bot is a personal AI agent built into Slack, and it starts with your context, your messages, files, and channels. Translation: an AI that already knows how you work. Check it out at slack.com. When you think of short vertical video, what do you think of? For me, I think of social media brain rot. And somehow I've made it through my life without ever doomscrolling any vertical videos. But that might change with a new Google update to the powerful Notebook LM suite. Why is that? Well, because now we have vertical video that's actually helping you learn new topics you care about, not just trying to rot your brain and get you addicted to an algorithm. So you might have missed this one, but Notebook LM rolled out new cinematic shorts, which are 60-second vertical videos accessible in NotebookLM's web interface and mobile apps, all based on your data and directed by you. And while, yes, they're great for bite-sized learning and personalized info, but I think that this new drop from Google and NotebookLM unlocks a whole new way to grow your company and your career. That's kind of what we're all about here, right? Well, let's get into it. Here is the big picture: NotebookLM adds vertical video. That's not brain rot. So they just launched this last week and it's available now. And each short runs about 60 seconds. It is narrated, uh, with an AI voiceover. Uh, there's captions and it's really built for just phone scrolling. Yes, you can watch these on your computer, but on the mobile app is where you can actually get some great utility out of these. And every short pulls its visuals and script only from the sources you upload. So that's the big, you know, big differentiator that NotebookLM has had all along, that it's grounded just in the information you upload. So you don't have to worry as much about hallucinations or, you You know, sometimes this really generic info that sounds both helpful and made up, you don't have to worry about that. And this feature is being rolled out, the great part here, to free and paid users. So on today's show, stick with me, this one is actually going to be a short one for the next 20-ish minutes, and you're going to learn the brand new engine for images from Google that's quietly rendering every frame behind this feature. You're going to know what plans unlock how many Shorts and the daily limits. If you really want to go crazy with these new vertical videos. And I'm gonna give you 5 real use cases and prompting tips for getting the sharpest results each time. All right, if you're new here, welcome to Everyday AI. My name's Jordan Wilson, and well, I do this for you. I work for you. It's a daily unscripted, unedited live, livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping business leaders like you and me keep up with the nonstop avalanche of these new AI updates. I tell you what matters, what doesn't, teach you how to use it, especially on Wednesdays. You take that information and voilà, you're the smartest person in AI in your company. So starts here, but make sure to go to our website at youreverydayai.com. We're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show as well as all of the other AI news you need to know. Yeah, a lot of stuff happening. Meta has a new Muse Photo, Muse Video. We're probably going to get, you know, we got Cowork on the web from Claude, all that stuff. So make sure to go check out the newsletter today. And If you do find this helpful, make sure you share today's episode on LinkedIn. So if you are listening on the podcast, we always put the link to the LinkedIn post in the show notes. So check that out, go repost this show, and I'm gonna send you our Shorts guide for busy leaders. Uh, it's a ton of extra resources, prompt examples. Uh, I think we have 10, uh, 10 tips and tricks, uh, and then 10 use cases. We're gonna go over 5 and 5 today. So if you want the rest and prompt examples, make sure to share today's show. So let's get into it. And well, we're going to start live because this is AI at Work on Wednesdays. We do this on Wednesdays. We go hands-on with some demos. So we're going to start, uh, I'm actually going to start a prompt, show you around the, uh, updated interface, and then we're going to go through what's new and then check in on it at the end. Because maybe this will work, maybe it'll be great, maybe it won't. All right, so, uh, livestream audience, if you could do me a favor, let me know if you can share my screen. So for our podcast audience. Don't worry, this one's not super visual, so I will do my best to explain it to you. So I am in NotebookLM. If you don't know NotebookLM, well, number one, your life's about to be changed. But number two, where have you been hiding? All right. It has been my probably most used tool overall since it came out a couple of years ago. It's not my most used tool today. That's Codex. And I actually have Codex using NotebookLM all the time to make me these kind of things. But if you are brand new to NotebookLM, it's super simple. There's essentially 3 panes, all right? On the left pane, that's where you add your sources. That can be upload PDFs, things from your Google Drive, YouTube videos, copy and paste text, whatever it is. On the middle, that's kind of your chat pane. So you can chat like you would with ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, right? So this is obviously powered by Google Gemini's models. But the big key is it stays grounded only in the information that you upload. So in this case, in what I'm doing for this example, I just uploaded a bunch of information about Everyday AI, right? Just took some stuff from our website, some other places. So that's in the sources on the left-hand side. And in the middle, you chat with your sources and it stays grounded only in that information that you upload. So if I ask, you know, as an example, you know, when did the Cubs win the World Series last? All right. I know it was 2016, but in theory, chat should come back to me and say, well, I'm not sure. All right. Interesting. So they did change this a little bit. It says the provided sources do not contain information about when the Chicago Cubs last won. However, using outside information outside of the sources, the Chicago Cubs won. So it does say, hey, this is or is not in your sources, but that's kind of new. So I didn't actually know that. Hey, it's a fun part of doing these things live. I find out things just as you do. All right, so then on the right-hand side, that's where we're, what we're really going to be exploring a little bit more today. That is your studio. And we've done probably at least 5 to 8 Notebook LM episodes over the past 2 or 3 years. And we've gone over in great depth these different kind of studio assets. So everything from, and most of these can be customized as well. So audio overviews, and that's how Notebook LM kind of originally went quote unquote viral with the AI-generated podcasts between the two hosts that riff on all your information. I listen to honestly at least 12 to 15 of those a week. Uh, it's ridiculous. So good. Uh, so audio overviews, slide decks, uh, creating decks with Nanobanana, video overviews, mind maps, reports, flashcards, quizzes, infographics, and data tables.

All right.

And then anything that you generate is going to show up then on the right-hand side. So, uh, that's your three panes. So here's what's new. If you're looking for it, well, right now there's a little explanatory banner promoting it, but that's not going to be there forever. So actually what you're going to do, and I'm on the desktop here, you're going to go to video overview. I'm going to have to tell the team there's some animations that are different. Anyways, the video overview, just go ahead and click the right button. So there's a little caret and that helps you customize. So when you do that, you're going to see this new option pop up on the right-hand side because there's technically 3 different types of videos that you can now create. We're going to get to that later, but I'm going to choose the new one, which is short. And the description is this is a bite-sized overview to help you quickly grasp core ideas from your sources. And then you can choose the sources. I only have one source uploaded, so that's what it's going to pull from. And then it also gives you kind of based This is all dynamically generated based on the sources that you have uploaded. It's going to give you quick ideas on what you could base this 60-second short on, but I'm going to really push it here. So I have a little prompt that I tried, so I'm going to go ahead, paste it in and click Generate. And let me just read out for our audience exactly what that prompt is. So I said, create a 60-second vertical promo for Everyday AI. The ad angle: people who— people don't need more AI tools. Zoomed into my text there. People don't need more AI tools. They need to know what to do with them. Style: fast, bold, business-focused. And then I gave it some of our brand guidelines, the colors, the fonts. And then I also gave it almost a little bit of a structure. So I said, you know, in— I gave it kind of how to open, you know, flash some tool logos, model names, prompts, etc. Then you get into the problem, you know, teams are overwhelmed buying too many tools. In the middle, that's where Everyday AI comes in. And then toward the end, show transformation from noise to decisions, from prompts to workflows. And then at the very end, inserting my own call to action. So normally, I don't think most people are putting in that detail, the prompts, but I really want to push this to see how far we can get. And it might take a while. So I do have a similar video that's already done. Yeah, unfortunately, and I've tried just basic, you know, out-of-the-box defaults, and those still will take somewhere from maybe 7 to 10 minutes. So even though these are only 1 minute, they can take a little bit of time to render or create. And in this customized version, in a lot of the testing I've done, sometimes the more detailed you are, like my prompt, my custom prompt for this was extremely detailed, so it might take you know, 10 or 15 minutes. So hopefully at the very end of this, as I go over all the other details, it will be done. If not, we already have one. All right. So let's go over a little bit more of the details, what's new and how this all works. So like I said, there are now 3 distinct different video overview formats. So the first one that came out is your standard explainer videos. So, you know, also very cool. There's different styles that you can do. So I'm actually going to kind of walk through some of those. So in the explainer video, you know, you can do a custom style, classic, whiteboard, anime, watercolor. So, you know, retro print. So they have some of these predefined styles. The same thing, you can also do your custom topic cinematic. So this is, you do have to be on a paid plan and the cinematic are much more limited because it's using Google's Veo image or sorry, Veo video generator, which is very compute intensive. So, but they're they're really good. So those usually run about 5+ minutes. The explainer videos, those are actually available in free plans, and those aren't like truly videos per se. They're just, you know, images with a little bit of, you know, text and animations over them. Cinematic is actual moving video. And then the short videos, as we'll see, it's kind of like a mixture between the two. So you do have some actual video animations, but for the most part, it is just more images, uh, with some captions over it. Uh, the animated animated voice, which is, you know, really cool as well. So 3 distinct different video types included in NotebookLM. So paid and pro users got Shorts first. And I do think the free access has already mostly been rolled out. My kind of— I do have a personal— oh no, that's a paid plan too. I think I got to check. Yeah, actually, let me, let me just do this, you know, live here. That's one of the benefits maybe of this podcast, right? It's not scripted. You don't get an AI version of me. You just get me figuring things out as we go along, right? So, okay. So good to know. I did go into one of my free plans because I have 3 different paid Google plans. Yeah, I pay a lot of money to test all this stuff out for you guys, so hopefully it's helpful. So there is a video overview on a free plan. Right, which is good to know. But you do not have cinematic. Cinematic is only on the paid plans. So even with these limits, though, on the Shorts, you still have the ability to customize it, which is really nice. It's not like you just get the defaults, so you can still do a lot. But I believe right now free users only get 3 Shorts daily, and that's actually not that bad, right? Pro users get up to 20 a day. So for me, I have been generating these with Codex. I don't do it. Codex goes in and does it. I love these Shorts. I make them for a little bit of everything, and I'm going to share some of my favorite use cases here at the end. So this is a new model under the hood, which is one of the reasons why they can make this free. So yeah, if you missed this, Google did just release Nano Banana 2 Lite. So Nano Banana 2 has been out for a while. We have Nano Banana Pro. So Nano Banana 2 Lite is technically the Gemini 3.1 Flashlight image model. All right. So this is the new model that generates each image. And the images, according to Google, take about 4 seconds. So these are— it is powered by a new image model from Google, stitches them all together, some animations, captions to go over it, all that good stuff. And that's why Google can't— well, they are still— I know it's complaining, right? Oh my gosh, this thing takes 7 to 10 minutes. I mean, when you look at the quality, it's really good. I used to edit videos for like kind of my career for, you know, a good 5 to 12 years on and off. I never would have been able to make something like this. It's really good. And it maybe would have taken me, you know, 40, 40 hours to create something. You know, I wasn't great at After Effects. I probably would have to use like a template. But, you know, overall, it's really good. It's a nice combination of, uh, moving visual— moving visuals, captions, audio over, uh, an audio, uh, voiceover narrating it as well. So how does it work? Like I said, very simple. Upload your sources on the left-hand side, um, and then on the Studio right-hand side, uh, click the video and then go into the Shorts and then customize it at will. All right, but a couple of things to keep in mind. You can steer the topic on the front end like you saw me do, but once it's produced, it's produced. All right. And that's a little bit different because one thing that I really like about NotebookLM, specifically the slide decks, is you can actually go in and make annotations and edits and updates to the slide deck, which is really cool. So maybe one day we'll get that with these animated shorts, but right now you don't get that. And it seems like no matter what the length, I don't know why the length of these are always about a minute and 4 to a minute and 5 seconds. So even if you say make me something 30 seconds or make me something 90 seconds, for the most part, they're always going to be about a minute and 4 seconds. And then there's the little NotebookLM logo that pops up at the end. So keep that in mind. It can be edited, but if you are on a paid plan, you have plenty of generations to get something just right how you might want to use it. All right. So one thing's wrong, you're done for. So that is— should tell you, you do need to get a little bit of practice on this if you want it to be part of your workflow. But then once you do get something that you like, you can then download it, share it, delete it, or just regenerate it by iterating on the prompt. Right. One thing you can do, especially if you get a template that you really, really like, here's a little cheat code or Find a great short template that you like online, then use Google's AI Studio. It's one of the only, um, models that can ingest and understand video, actually what's happening. And then tell Google's AI Studio, hey, go look at this short, look at the format. And you know, it really will only work for more explainer type videos, but say, hey, write me an exact script that explains every visual, every transition, etc. So these are actually very steerable. So my best practice of using these you know, for since they came out, I've, I've made a few dozen, is always start just with a, a template, right? Don't even customize it. See what it creates with your sources out of the box. Then from there, you know, start with a simple prompt, then get more and more advanced. So this is something, if you think of the, you know, back in the day working with the original ChatGPT, the first Claude, et cetera, you did have to put a lot more prompting. Today it's more about context steering. With these, you do have to really kind of get best practices of prompting. So I would start easy, then start to customize your prompts. Then once you find something you kind of like, you know, find a good example of a short you like, upload that into Google's AI Studio. Uh, use, you know, uh, 3, 3, 1 flash should be fine. Uh, and say, hey, write me a template that I can use, uh, for NotebookLM's, uh, vertical, uh, cinematic overviews. It'll write you something. Go test that out. I can guarantee you it's going to be really, really good. All right, now let's get to our 5 tips and shortcuts, but in just a minute, gotta take a quick break for a word from our partners. Here's what most AI tools still can't do: work outside their own little box. The all-new Slackbot just changed that. It's your AI teammate inside Slack, and now it can read, write, and act across the other apps your team already uses. No more tool switching, no more re-explaining yourself every time you open a new tab. One ops team at InGen says the summary feature alone saves them 15 to 20 minutes of use. See what Slackbot can do at slack.com. All right, so let us quickly go over the 5 tips and 5 best use cases. So, and then we will check in. Our video is still generating, but hopefully it will be done here. Once we go over these use cases. So let's get it going. All right. First tip number 1, start with a specific question, not a broad topic. So especially if you have a lot of sources, don't ask NotebookLM to just like, hey, summarize this. Ask it to answer one specific question, like what's the one thing a sales leader needs to learn from this? Right. You know, customize it and personalize it. For yourself. All right, tip number 2, define the audience in the prompt. So tell NotebookLM who the short is for. It's for, you know, busy executive, sales rep, customers, new hires, right? A CFO version and a frontline manager version of the same source should not sound the same, and NotebookLM will be able to simplify and frame differently depending on who you tell it the viewer is. Tip 3, turn one long source into several focused shorts, not one overloaded one. So if you do have a fat notebook or even a notebook that's one very long source, if you just click it and think you're gonna get something useful, eh, not really. All right, so turn it into a lot of separate ones. Even use the chat panel in the middle saying, hey, based on all of this, here's who I am, here's what I'm trying to learn. Give me 6 specific or 10 specific prompts that can help me learn 6 to 10 different individual pieces. That's going to help you get a lot more out of these Shorts. Tip number 4: Bake the call to action into the prompt itself, especially if you are using this for, well, even internal or external stakeholders. I kind of read that at the end of my example that I did, but otherwise it's just like you don't have a lot of control. So if you want this to be used for a purpose, make sure you bake that CTA in because, well, it will usually do it. So just write it directly, right? Point viewers toward the full report or, you know, tell managers to share this with their team. Right. That's the law. That's kind of the line between this being a fun little demo and something that actually drives your business goals. All right. And then number 5, generate multiple versions before picking one. Trust me. Right. Use that. If you're on a paid account, use those 20 a day. Right. Just get 3, 4, 5 of them going all at once. Check back in an hour later, see which ones are good. Make one round of iterations. Once you get that, then you have that kind of template, right? In the same way that you have maybe a PowerPoint template that's approved by your team, you're going to have to go through a lot of iterations. Don't just sit there and watch. Just do 5 of them. Come back, like I said, in an hour. See what's worked, what doesn't. Improve on those or use, you know, Google AI Studio or something else to do it. Come back, iterate. But you have to make multiple generations before picking one. All right. Now let's quickly talk about the 5 best use case examples for NotebookLM Shorts because, Yes, I mean the low-hanging fruit, the obvious stuff, right? If you're trying to learn a new topic, blah, blah, blah. If you're, you know, studying for a sales call, yeah, we get it. But let's get some creative ones I think that are good. Number 1, executive briefings from long reports. These are huge. I don't know if you're like me, the combination of videos, audio, and reading something on screen, this is a big unlock for me, right? I love NotebookLM. But, you know, one thing, if I'm being honest, that I wish that they had in the audio overviews, right? Because I use them on my phone a lot when I go out and touch grass. Yes, I do touch grass. People who say, hey, weird guy, you should stop working so much, you know, go see what the world's like. I go outside and usually I have NotebookLM and I'm listening to an audio overview, maybe going over my emails, my priorities, things I missed, right? Whatever it is. But I would love if the audio overviews actually had words on the front, right? So this is kind of like the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, it's only 60 seconds at a time, but you gotta take what you can. But I mean, for an executive briefing, right, to be able to upload a dense, you know, analyst note or 40-page industry report and turn that into a series of, you know, fast 60-second briefings, what changed, why it matters, what to do next. I mean, that's a huge unlock, especially for busy executives. Uh, number 2, customer education from FAQ and support docs, right? Who's actually reading those things? But if you make them fun and interactive, uh, and personalized, now you can turn one of your most common support questions into an individual explainer short, right? Even just embed that thing on your website, right? Instead of having all these different Q&As, I don't know. Uh, just throw it on your website. Um, all right, next, uh, repurposing webinars and podcasts into social content, right? That's one thing I've been thinking about. One Once I get a template I really like for these, maybe we'll start posting these things, I don't know, in our newsletter or in our inner circle community, right? To help people, you know, digest. Maybe it's just the newsletter, right? Here's the newsletter in 60 seconds, and if you want more, go read the actual thing. But, you know, repurposing different longer forms of content into short social content. So even like a 45-minute, you know, webinar that maybe you have on YouTube, grab that YouTube link, throw it in a NotebookLM in the middle chat. Give me, hey, what are the 10 best takeaways for, I don't know, a busy sales leader from this 45-minute webinar and then write me a specific prompt. Here's kind of our template that we need. Use this template, you know, with our brand colors, our brand voice, and then give me, you know, 10 prompts I can use. Take those and there you go. All right. Number 4, on-brand marketing content built with your brand guidelines. So similar to what I just said, but you can upload your brand guidelines as a short so you don't have to reference them all the time in that custom prompt. That's the thing. NotebookLM, people don't know this. It is very steerable. So you can have it use certain, you know, content from your, from your sources. You can upload images and use those. So it is really steerable, but using your actual branded content, but being able to put those, you know, like I said, on your website, on YouTube, being able to make these branded assets that you use in your marketing and advertising. That's kind of like my example. Which— all right, it just finished. That's my example, right? Something in theory I could use with a little bit of tweaking for an advertising or marketing campaign. All right. And then last but not least, internal training from, you know, SOPs and playbooks. So you have those long, dense guidelines, right? Maybe they're stored in Google Docs, maybe it's a PDF. Drop those in, right? And say, okay, well, you know, this week we're, you know, onboarding, you know, new people. In HR, right? Upload all of those, make them customizable for HR. If there's 10, you know, modules that are, you know, 10 pages each, well, make them a little bit more enjoyable with a personalized 60-second video, you know, either in the beginning or the end that helps those lessons stick a little bit better, right? It's not a replacement for proper documentation, but it's the thing the new hire actually watches instead of just skimming the headlines in a, you know, 30-page PDF. All right. So let's check back in live as we wrap up today's show. So hopefully we'll be able to hear this. All right. So I am going to have to remove this and reshare my screen to make sure that we can get audio. Let's see. We're going to do that. We're going to do Chrome tab. Same thing.

Audience.

Please let me know if you can see in here. So we are done. And here is our generation. So as a reminder, this was the kind of a 60-second video on Stop Collecting Tools. I gave it our brand guidelines, prompts, colors, right? It should have, you know, a certain font, a dark navy, a lighter blue color. And then I also gave it— I essentially broke up that 60 seconds into 6 different periods, and I gave it very strict kind of steering. So it should start with flashing some tool logos, model names, prompts, agent dashboards, and some text should come on that says, another AI tool won't save you. All right. So for our livestream audience, we're technically taking another 60-second break as we see our finished product here before we wrap our show.

So here, buying another AI subscription.

Let's make this full screen so hopefully we can see it. There we go. And let's take a listen.

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All right. So overall, like I'm, I'm, I'm looking at my prompt I gave it, I'd say it's about 85 to 95% adherence to the actual prompt. So there were some things that it didn't get exactly right. Exactly right, but a lot of it, it nailed, right? So it didn't get the exact opener where I said to open with another AI tool won't save you. Let's see what it actually said. Okay, I'm wrong. The background text actually had that. The voiceover text didn't. So I could have clarified that, but it actually did a really good job. So, you know, Yes, there's a lot of still images, but there was a lot of animation. You know, the animation isn't something that you would—

until it's ready for work—

or expect out of a video model. But this is technically an image model adding in some motion graphics, some animation. So overall, for a one-shot, you know, output, pretty okay. Would I use this, you know, in a marketing advertising campaign right now?

No.

Could I refine it a couple of times and get something to maybe test out, uh, or even to hand over to a motion graphic designer and say, hey, here's exactly what I want? Absolutely. So, uh, that is a wrap for today's show. Now you know what's new inside NotebookLM's new Cinematic Shorts, how they work, 5 tips and 5 use cases. But if you want even more, make sure to go share and repost today's show on LinkedIn. So look in the show notes if you are listening on the podcast and in the show notes, we always put a link to today's show on LinkedIn. If you want that Shorts guide for busy leaders, it is good. As always, we don't do these assets a ton because I like to make them super valuable and make it worth that, you know, 20 seconds to go repost this on LinkedIn. So if you want to support the work that we do, that's a great way to do it. So that's a wrap. I hope today's AI at Work on Wednesday was helpful. I mean, you guys voted for it, FYI. So, you know, if you see these things on Wednesdays and you're like, these stink. Well, on Monday or Tuesday in our newsletter, we always put a poll saying, hey, what new, you know, tool do you want to go under the hood on Wednesday? So I work for you. I hope this is helpful. If you haven't already, please go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'all. Here's the thing about AI at work. You can't use what you don't trust. The all-new Slackbot runs inside Slack security boundary, only sees what you've already allowed it to see, and never trains on your data. Personal AI agent with the trust to actually put it to work. Slackbot from Slack. Learn more at slack.com.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.