How To Make A VIRAL AI Music Video (For Free)

Matt Wolfe walks through making an AI music video for free. He generates a synthy pop song called Binary Dreams with Suno, creates images in Midjourney using the lyrics, animates them with Luma Dream Machine, and cuts everything to the beat in DaVinci Resolve.
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I want to make another music video that leverages the power of AI to do most of the work for me. About nine months ago, I made this video called Make a Hit Song and Music Video with AI for free. And while the video did pretty well on my channel, I wasn't super happy with the final result. A lot of the technology that existed nine months ago was. Was cool for the time, but things have come a long way since then. We've got better music generators, we've got better video generators. So I wanted to revisit this concept and see how much better of a music video we could make. And the bar is not very high because, well, here's the original video. Take a look.
Let me tell you about this thing called AI.
It's smart and it's quick. It'll surely make you sigh. It learns and adapts. Oh, it's a sight to behold. So, yeah, I mean, if you want to trip down memory lane, go check out this video from 9 months ago and see how that video was made. But the technology, like I mentioned, so much better now. So let's try to make something a little bit more impressive. So for creating the song itself, you really have two good options for making really good, high quality music. You've got Yu dio over@yudio.com and you've got Suno over@suno.com. i really like both of these tools. I feel like Yu Dio is a little bit better at making music that's going to maybe trick the audience into thinking that it's real. You can make songs with this, listen back to it. Most people will probably be fooled that that was actually made with AI because it's very realistic music. However, I personally prefer the music that Sudo makes. It's sort of bizarre because a lot of times you can actually tell that it's AI. You listen to the music and you can hear little elements. You know, you ask it to say things like AI, it'll just go. And it will tend to sort of blend words together and things like that that are a dead giveaway that the song was generated with AI. But I just feel like whenever I make songs with Suno, I find myself sort of bobbing my head and being a little bit more impressed with the music of it. Yuio better realism. Suno just more enjoyable music. I don't know why. That's just my opinion on it. And when it comes to the actual video portion of it, back then, AI generated video, there wasn't a lot that we can use. We had Runway And Plasma Punk and Defor nothing that generated higher quality, more consistent AI generated video. Well, since then, we've got Dream Machine from Luma, which makes some pretty dang impressive videos, especially if you start with an image. It's not very good at text to video yet from my experimentation, but when you start with an image inside of Dream Machine and then you have it generate a video from that image, it's actually pretty dang impressive. And on that note, the image generators have gotten a lot better since that last video. So when we want to make a video with Dream Machine, our starting image that we're going to input is better now than what we would have gotten nine months ago. Tools like Leonardo and Midjourney and Dall E3 have gotten a lot better. So for this music video this time around, I'm going to use Suno for the music. Now for the image generation portion of this video, I'm actually going to use Mid Journey right now. For me, it's always a toss up between Leonardo and Midjourney, but I still think Midjourney edges out Leonardo a tiny bit on realism. But if I was going for more of a cartoony or illustration, I would probably go with Leonardo for this. And before I go any deeper into this, nobody's sponsoring this video and nobody has given me free access to their tools. However, you can generate up to 10 songs a day for free. So you can do the music part for free with Suno, with Luma Dream Machine, once again, I'm paying for it myself. However, Dream Machine does allow up to 30 generations per month for free. So this can also be done for free. The video portion and then Midjourney, same thing. I'm a paying subscriber to Midjourney now. This is the only tool that I'm using that I'm going to show off during this video that you do need to pay for if you want to generate images in this way. However, there are so many free alternatives to generate images that you can then turn into videos. You can use Leonardo AI, you can use Bing Image Creator, which uses Dall E3, you can use Ideogram. There are plenty of free options available. I'm just going to use Mid Journey on this one because I really wanted to sort of test the limits of the realism that I can get. But it's not required again that you use Mid Journey for this process. It's just the image generator tool that I'm choosing to use for this video. All right, now that we've gotten all of that out of the way, let's get into making a song. So I'm going to head over to suno.com and I want a poppy dance song. Walking through the advancements in technology from the first computers all the way through Generative AI and into the future. Let's go ahead and click create and see what it comes up with. Let's take a peek at the lyrics for our first one here. Plugging in the first machine Blips and bloops the early scene binary dreams. So it actually did kind of work through the song in chronological order, which is really cool. So let's take a listen.
Plugging in the first machine blitz and bloops the early scene binary dreams code so clean worlds unfold in data stream.
So I really like that that might be the version I end up going with. I like the lyrics that it shows and I want to make sure I use those same lyrics again. So I'm going to go ahead and copy all of these lyrics over here. We'll go ahead, right click copy and then I'm going to switch over to custom mode inside of suno and under this lyrics I'm going to go ahead and just paste this in so it'll follow that same format of verse, verse 2 chorus, bridge, verse 3, chorus. For styles of music, let's go poppy rock. Let's see if we can get it a little more rockin. Let's go ahead and do rock pop but also with synth. Let's see if we can get a poppy, rocky, synthy song with those lyrics. Here's our first version.
Plugging in the first machine.
Very, very 80s. Let's go and listen to the next one. Hell yeah. Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. All right. I like that version of the song. I like this sort of dancey Cynthia Poppy 80s rock. Like all of that blended together just perfect, especially for the subject material. So now what I need to do is I need to start creating the scenes that are going to go with this music video. So to start, whenever there's no lyrics, I want to have people sort of dancing around. So to do that again, I'm going to go ahead and use Midjourney. So we'll come over to midjourney.com and you can use any image generator you want for this. I'm just using Mid Journey because I want to test see if I can get some realism into it. So I'll do a colorful scene of a group of people dancing in the 1980s in a retro club. I want to go landscape for the Size, actually, I'm going to stretch this out to 16. 9. That's my preferred size. Also going to switch to RAW mode instead of standard mode because RAW tends to get you a little bit more realism. And let's just see what we get out of that prompt there. So it actually gave me more of like a cartoony style. Less realistic probably because I put the word retro in there. Maybe if I drop the word retro it'll make it more realistic. But I actually like some of this imagery. So we might try some of this for our video. I especially like these two on the right here. So let's go ahead and click this one and we'll go ahead and download it. I also liked this one, so we'll go ahead and download this as well. Whether or not they make our video, I'm not sure yet. But doesn't hurt to play around with them. Now I'm going to go ahead and use the exact same prompt. I'm just going to word it a little bit different to try to get some more realism out of it. So a colorful scene of a group of people dancing in the 1980s I'll get rid of in a retro club. I think the retro kind of tried to make it like a retro looking image. And instead of a colorful scene, let's do a colorful photo of a group of people dancing in the 1980s. See if we can get that photo realism in there. We got some interesting images here. This one's looking a little more realistic, but this girl looks like she's got a mustache here. I don't know what's going on with her hands. This girl has a disappearing arm. This one's not too bad. It just looks like there's like an extra leg in here. I'll go ahead and download this one. It might be usable. We'll see. I actually think this is one of the better photos. But the problem is this girl's head's on backwards. So that's not going to work very well. And this one's not bad either. But it's awfully close to being not safe for work right here. So let's go ahead and do very. But do very strong and make some other similar images but different. So we got a few more variations. This one here is not bad, but I don't know what's going on with like this girl's face is turned this way, but her arm is going this way. Like, I don't know. Let's use it. Let's see what happens when we turn it into a Video. So now I've got four images that I downloaded. Let's turn these into videos real quick. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to jump over to Luma Dream Machine, click on the little image button to upload an image, and I'll upload our first little more illustration style image here. And then what I've been doing, which has been working pretty well, is just using the exact same prompt. So this one we used a colorful scene of a group of people dancing in the 1980s in a retro club. If I just copy this text here and paste that as the same prompt, it's actually been working out decent. So let's go ahead and do that. We'll grab the other image that we did on that first round. Once again, paste in that same exact prompt. We'll just toss all of these into queue. It looks like it's moving pretty fast because this one already says it's dreaming. Let's go ahead and pull in our other two images. Get those going. We've got this dance image which used the prompt a colorful photo. I'll go ahead and grab this one. We'll paste it in here. But I'm going to get rid of a photo and just do a group of people dancing in the 1980s because it's obviously a video and not a photo. All right, so let's take a quick peek at what it generated with each of our videos. Here's our first generation. Not too bad, not amazing, but probably usable. It just looks a little too morphy for my taste. Here's the next one. That one's looking a lot better, actually. That's usable. I think we've got our third one here. Yeah, that looks good. That's, like, perfect. Especially if I can line up the jumps to the beat of the song. That would be awesome. And here's the next one. Actually not looking too bad either. Her hand just disappeared there for a minute towards the end. But I think that's going to be usable as well, because most of these are only going to be on the screen for so quick that hopefully it just keeps on moving and you don't really notice some of that weirdness. I mean, we'll know because we're making the video, but hopefully other people don't notice that. So I've got some dancing scenes that I can jump over to when there's no actual lyrics going, but I want to make some images that go along with the lyrics. So plugging in the first machine, blips and bloops the early scene. Let's just try an early retro computer. And what I'm going to do with this one, just to get more variations is I'm going to go ahead and do it with our Style RAW setting turned on. Then I'm going to go ahead and use this same text again, again. And let's turn RAW off and see how it changes our images. So with Style Raw, I really like this top right one and I really like this bottom left one. So I'm going to grab both of these. We'll download this image, and we'll download this image here. And then our normal styles are still generating here, but we can see they're not too bad either. Actually, I kind of like this bottom right one. So let's go ahead and download this as well. Let's grab our prompt. An early retro computer jump into Dream Machine. And once again we're going to grab each of our images. I'm going to use the same prompt and I'll go ahead and do this with all of these images that I just generated here. And here's the videos that generated from those images after, I don't know, roughly three minutes or so. So we've got our computers, it just kind of pans across and you can see like a retro office here. Here's another one where it's zooming in on this retro computer. And then here's another one. We're panning across all of this retro equipment as well. All very usable for the video. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through, read through the lyrics, do my best to generate an image in mid journey that represents what's being sung about on the video. Then I'm gonna take that image and I'm gonna toss it into Dream Machine and create a little short animation out of it. This is going to take me probably a good hour to do. Not because it takes a lot of time to write the prompt for the image, or because it takes a lot of time to, you know, take that image and put it into Luma Labs. It's just all of that inference time, the time to generate the image, the time it takes to generate the video from the image, it's gonna be a while before it's all ready. So I'm gonna go ahead and fast forward to the point where all of my images and videos are created and I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna edit them all together. Okay. So that actually took me quite a while. In fact, I'm actually recording this second part the next day. Because of how long it took to generate all these images, I definitely went a little overboard and generated way more images than I actually need. You can see all the im in mid journey here. I generated something like 200, 300 images that I might potentially use for this music video, which surprisingly didn't take that long. The part that took the longest amount of time was downloading each image, jumping over here to Luma's Dream Machine, putting the image and giving it a prompt. I did this something like 120 times. This is total overkill. I generated way more clips than absolutely necessary. I just wanted to make sure I was going to have like the perfect clips for the song. One thing I started doing to actually speed up the process was I went to Mid Journey. And originally I was entering prompts like a colorful photo of a group of people dancing in the 1980s and getting stuff like this, an early retro computer binary code. But then what I started to do after that was I literally just took the lyrics from the SUNO song and plugged them into Midjourney to see what Mid Journey would generate with the lyrics. So if I come up here, you can see I put from the Past to the Future. And then once I got the image, I took this image, pulled it into Dream Machine, and this is the video clip it generated. So AI generated the song lyrics, it generated the beat to the song. I actually took the song lyrics, used those as the actual prompts to get the images, and then took those images and turned them into videos again using that exact same prompt and and got some pretty cool video footage that I think will go really well for a music video. But I don't want to understate that. This did take a while. But I also went total overkill and generated probably 10 times more videos than I'm actually going to need or use in this video. Also, between the time I started recording this video and today when I'm finalizing this video, Luma actually rolled out a new feature. You can see here, it says, today we are releasing extended video. So I went ahead and took some of my favorite prompts like this one of the people jumping around and dancing and actually extended it. So now it's a 10 second video of people jumping around and dancing instead of just a five second. So now I only have one last step to do, and that's pull all this stuff together. I've got all of these videos. I've got our song here. I'm gonna go ahead and download the song. So now I've got the MP3 version of the song, and I've got all of these videos. I went ahead and downloaded all the videos one by one off recording, so you didn't have to sit there and watch me download them all. And now I'm gonna combine them all using DaVinci Resolve. I like DaVinci Resolve because it's a free video editor. It's one of the most powerful video editors. And the fact that the most powerful video editor is available for anybody to use for free still blows my mind to this day. It's really, really good. So I'm gonna go ahead and boot up DaVinci Resolve here. It also works on both PC and Mac, so it doesn't matter which system you're on, you should be able to use DaVinci. We'll create a new project, pull our song into the project that we just created in Suno. And now I'm going to pull our song onto the timeline. Now I have our song here on the timeline, and I can listen back to it. And then what I'm going to do in DaVinci, just to kind of keep it slightly cleaner, is I'm going to create a new bin here, and I'm going to call this bin Luma Videos. And then all of the videos that I just generated in Luma, I'm going to pull it into this bin here. Again, it's a lot. It's overkill. I'm not going to actually end up using all of these. I just wanted to make a ton of videos so I knew I could pull it all together. Our song is 3 minutes and 37 seconds. I actually think I'm going to cut it off a little bit short. It starts to kind of repeat itself towards the end. And since this video is for demonstration purposes, I don't think I need a full 3 1/2 minute music video. Now, when it comes to editing a music video together, the trick to getting a music video to look really good is to edit to the beats. So if I zoom in on my timeline here, we can actually kind of see where the beats are. If I extend this a little bit larger, we can see that each one of these spikes right here is the base hit. So if the video is going to cut to a different scene, we want those cuts to happen right on that hit. For example, if I'm going to take this video where they're all jumping around, ideally I can time it so each little hop is right on the beat. Let's go ahead and pull this in like this Drop it on our timeline. And this is what it looks like to start. Now, it's not really timed perfectly. And if I want it to be timed perfectly, I can right click on my video clip here, go to retime controls, and then I can actually speed up or slow down the video by dragging it out or dragging it in. And ideally I can change the pace of the video so that it looks like the jumps are happening right on the beat. And so now you can see I slowed it down so it's 125% of the original length, which is slightly slower than it was originally. But if we watch it, it kind of looks like they're bouncing to the beat now. And when I do want it to cut to another clip, what I'm going to do is make sure that that cut happens right on one of these changes. And since the lyrics start off talking about retro machines, I'm going to go through my video clips and find some of these little like retro machine videos that we've got. You can go ahead and pull this one in right here. I'll cut it to the beat. So that clip will show for about one second. And then we'll go to another clip. It's somewhat similar. And once again I'll cut it on the beat. Here's another retro computer clip. Cut it on the beat. And then I want to use this one last because it sort of zooms in on the computer, which will make a good transition into the next scene. But because I still want it to sort of change scenes to the beat, what I'm going to actually do is cut it at about one second. Right about there I'm going to do a cut and then I'm going to jump a little bit closer. I'll cut to about right here so it's a little more zoomed in on the computer. For the next shot. Cut this at the beat. And so right on the beat you can see that it's sort of zoomed into the computer. And then I want to go to some of this like binary, like matrix looking imagery. I like this one because it sort of continues that zoom in effect. So I'll plug this in here, make this one go for about one second, cut it right on the beat. Again, moving to this one, that looks like a sort of similar style imagery. We'll cut that on the beat, pull in another one of these and you can see where this is going, like to cut it to the beat. So now I've got the first 12 seconds of the video kind of edited together. And here's what it looks like so far. And that's what we've got so far. Now, this is probably going to take me a good 30 minutes or so to go and add all of my various clips to the timeline. So I'm going to go ahead and pause the video, finish adding all these clips on, and then show you the final product. All right, So I finally finished pulling it all together. If I sort of zoom out on my timeline, you can see I've got my cuts here. My cuts are about every one second. And then in certain areas where the pace of the song slows down, I actually do my cuts every two seconds instead of every one second. So the video itself is pretty fast paced. It's changing scenes every single second. But I think it works really well with the pace of the song. One thing I did while cutting it together was I had this intro that I started to use with everybody dancing. And since a lot of this other video footage just feels so random, right? We've got, like old computer screens and then like matrix style binary going on the screen. People at computers, you know, stuff that's supposed to represent data waves, and it's all kind of jumping around randomly. So I decided to add these, like, dance clips in every, I don't know, 20 to 30 seconds just to kind of give it this cohesiveness, just to tie it all back together. You can see a whole bunch of chops here. This was me just trying to chop at every second so that it was easy for me to snap my clips to the exact perfect time marker. But then I got lazy and stopped doing it after that for a little bit. And then at the end, what I did, this song was actually over three minutes, but. But after about a minute and a half, the song just kind of repeats itself. So I did a fade out on the audio at the end, and then I started to tie these dance clips back in at the end to sort of bookend it with the same way that it started. But I bring those back in every second. So when you see the video, you'll see that it sort of moves to the beat of the song as they're dancing. And then the video finally wraps up. This final shot was one of my favorite shots that Luma generated for me, where there's this girl looking at a screen with flowers, and then she kind of turns her head towards the camera at the end. And then I end the video with her sort of looking to the side. I just thought that was a cool way to end the video. And that's it. That's the whole video. And I simply rendered the video out. And now here's the world premiere of a song that I've settled on. The title Binary Dreams.
The early scene Binary dreams code so clean world's unfold data streams, microchips and that big le Silicone dreams they never sleep Internet waves so deep Browsing wide the dead we see sweet from the past to the future Sense our guide and our tutors Watch three as. My hands virtual worlds we understand eight unconscious minds create us now Algorithms take a bow Robots moving Show us how future tech will show from the past to the future Sense our sky in our tutor Wash the screens as exploder on every beast each day.
And there it is. A little bit better than the country video that I showed you at the beginning. And again, quick recap. I generated the song quickly with suno.com it generated the lyrics and the beats for me behind it took me a couple tries to get a song that I really liked, but I'm really happy with the way the song came out. Once I had all of the lyrics, I literally took every single sentence from the song and then plugged it into Mid Journey here to get a few images for every line of the song. I essentially let AI decide what this video should look like. Then once I had all the images, I took each image, plugged it into Luma's Dream Machine, and then gave it the exact same prompt. Binary dreams code so clean Future Tech will surely wow. And it generated these videos based on that sort of ambiguous prompt. And then finally I took the videos that I generated, I took the audio I generated, I pulled it into DaVinci resolved, and then I edited to the beat so that every scene change happens on the base hits and the final result was the video that you just saw. And again, most of what I did you can do for free. You can generate a few songs for free with Suno. When it comes to images, you do need a paid account to generate with Mid Journey, but you can also do this in Leonardo Ideogram, Bing Image Creator, Stable Diffusion. There are so many other tools that you can also use to create the images. And then once you have the images, you can pull them into Luma's Dream Machine, which allows you to do up to 30 video generations per month with a cap of about 10 per day on the free plan. Again, none of this is sponsored. I've paid for every single one of these tools that you're seeing myself in order to generate this video and I'm pretty happy with the result and when it comes to AI video generation, we are just getting started. This year is going to be crazy with new AI video tools coming out. In fact, the day that I'm finalizing this video, Runway just announced Gen3 Alpha, which is their sort of Sora competitor or Luma Dream Machine competitor. It looks really, really good if you check out some of these videos that they're demoing on the Runway website. Now obviously when they put videos on the Runway website, they're most likely cherry picked videos of some of the best generations they got. But this is going to be another really fun AI video tool that we're going to get to play with really, really soon. So expect a lot more tutorials and tips and deep dives and explorations of these various AI video tools as they're made available for us. Because I love playing with this stuff. This is like my favorite thing to do. This is the stuff that got me into AI in the first place. My first AI videos were me making images with stable diffusion and mid journey and playing around with the text to song tools that were out and things like that. So this type of stuff is what really, really grabbed my attention and built my initial love for AI. So excited that all of these tools are finally getting into our hands to play with and to show off and to make tutorials around. So if you like stuff like this, make sure you like this video and also make sure you subscribe to this chann because I'm going to be showing off a lot more tools, keeping you in the loop with the AI news, creating more tutorials and all of that fun nerdy stuff in the world of AI. And make sure you also check out FutureTools IO. This is the website where I curate all of the cool AI tools that I come across. It's updated almost every single day. I also keep the news page up to date and there's a free newsletter. So if you want the coolest tools and the most important AI news delivered directly to your inbox, you can find all of that for free over at FutureTools IO. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this video. Hopefully you learned something. I can't wait to see some of the music videos that you generate. If you do generate some, post them on X or Instagram and Tag me. I'm Mr. Eflow on both platforms and I'd love to see what you create. Thanks again for tuning in. Really appreciate you. See you in the next video. Bye bye.










