The Best AI Video Generator: Pika Labs (Now FREE)

AI video has gotten absolutely crazy lately. And one of the most impressive AI video generators of the moment is Pika 1.0. In this video, I'm going to break down exactly what it can do. At the end of this video, I'll even show you how I made this intro. So let's get into it. So in my opinion, Pika 1.0 is the best text to video model we've seen so far. But it doesn't only do text to video. It does image to video. It does video to video. It gives us the ability to upscale videos and to continually add four seconds to to each video that we create. It's got outpainting, which they call Expand Canvas, and it's got inpainting, which they call Modify region. We can generate in six different aspect ratios and change the frames per second. We've got camera controls like pan left, pan right, tilt up, tilt down, rotate counterclockwise, rotate clockwise, zoom in, zoom out. You can even adjust the strength of the motion. And if you don't like the way a prompt turned out, you just click this retry button and it'll make that same prompt again and put it in line with the original. So all of your prompts that are exactly the same will just show up in a line right below the video. The user interface is super clean and simple. It's easy to find videos that you generated, and if you hover over them, you can see the animation quickly. And if you want to explore generations that other people have made, you click the Explore button and you can see some other cool videos that other people have made to get inspiration for your own. And, and if you like any of them, just like with your own videos, you can retry it, re prompt it, expand the canvas, modify the region, and do anything else that you'd be able to do on your own videos. Now, I got early access to Pika 1.0. It's rolling out slowly to more and more users right now. At the moment it's totally free to use, but I don't imagine it'll be free forever. And as you can see, since I've had access, I've made quite a bit of videos with it and really kind of tried to put it through its motions. The first prompt that I ever tried with this was a wolf on a mountaintop, howling at the moon. Colorful, high definition, cinematic. And you can see here what that video looked like. I then wanted to see what would happen if I added four more seconds to it, because I was pretty dang impressed with how this video came out. And you can see here it prompted a seven second version where the first three seconds are pretty much the same as the original video, but then it adds another four seconds on top of it and you can see some additional motion happening here. I then wanted to test the outpainting feature, so I clicked on Edit Expand Canvas and then expanded it to a 9 by 16. So I had that portrait view of it. And here's the result of switching it to a portrait view. You can see my same wolf is in the center of the video, but it added an animation below it and it added a moon up above it. And it looks pretty dang seamless. I went to try it again and this time it pretty much did the same thing. It put the wolf in the center, but it added a different background to the and a different background to the bottom. But it's still a super, super impressive video. I was able to generate an even longer video and stretch it all the way to 11 seconds. But quite honestly, it seems the longer I stretch it, the sort of worse the video gets. It kind of gets funky towards the end there, but you can extend videos longer and longer with it. One of my favorite videos I've been able to generate so far is this starlapse over Joshua Tree National Park. I thought this one came out really, really cool. I then wanted to test the inpainting feature where I took a existed and test swapping out what's in the video. So I took this original wolf video that I made here that was three seconds long and I changed the prompt to say a zebra on a mountaintop. And as you can see, it's pretty much the same wolf video, but it swapped out the wolf with a zebra. I then tested it with a cat, which I think it kind of looks like it's got two tails, but it's still pretty dang good. Tested it with a raccoon. Same video, except instead of a wolf, we got a raccoon. Then I tested it with a lion and I kept on swapping it out with different animals. So somebody on X asked me, how does it work if you upload a real image? Because when I upload a headshot of myself on Runway and let Runway turn it into a video, I get something that looks like this where it just sort of morphs me into a completely different person by the end. Well, guess what? When I do it in Pika, it just makes it look like I'm talking and it actually doesn't morph me into somebody else completely. So in order to really test how good the text to video was with Pika, I went to Discord and said, hey, what are some prompts I should test out? And. And the Discord community delivered and shared a whole bunch of cool ideas for prompts to test. So let's check some of these out here. Here's one of a flyover of a devastated apocalyptic city burning at night. Here's a cute green baby alien with big googly eyes looking up into the camera with puppy eyes. Pixar. Here's sunset over a futuristic city skyline with flying cars. Underwater city with glowing coral and diverse marine life. A vibrant alien marketplace bustling with various species. Enchanted forest with magical creatures and bioluminescent plants. A surreal dreamscape blending elements of land, sea and sky. Ancient temple ruins overgrown with colorful mystical flora. A bustling spaceport on Mars during a dust storm. I really like how this one came out. Northern lights illuminating a snow covered fantasy village. And then we tweaked it a little bit. The northern lights seen from a campground below. Cyberpunk street market. Neon lights under a rainy sky. A serene Zen garden with futuristic elements and robotics. I was also curious, would it generate some trademark ip? So I had it generate Pikachu, preparing a ball of an explosion of thunder. I mean, I'm not really seeing the ball or explosion of thunder, but we did confirm that it will generate Pikachu for us. Somebody asked me to generate a dancing cat with a monocle and a cigar. And here's what we got out of that. I see the cigar, but not really the monocle. I guess somebody wanted me to type in the prompt, recreate the short Deathly Hallows animation that Hermione narrates in Harry Potter 8.1. And this is what it was. I mean, it's got the Hermione pretty well and it shows her talking, but I don't think it necessarily knows the rest of the context around that video. A slow motion balloon exploding. It kind of went with the hot air balloon look, but still a pretty cool looking video. A jump scare of a horror. Slenderman, dark and scary. An anthropomorphic egg eating an omelet. I mean, yeah, Santa throwing gifts around the house. I mean it nailed Santa pretty well, but it's not really throwing gifts around too much. I had it actually generate that one twice. And either of them are great. I mean, they're great looking Santas, but missing the throwing the stuff around. This one was stick figures fighting anime style. Definitely a sort of anime style, but not really seeing the stick figures. And they're not really fighting either. I also wanted to test will it generate real life people? So I did Tom Hanks playing basketball and I got this video. I generated it twice. This was the other version. Both times it got Tom Hanks pretty well. But this one, it's really hard to tell that it might be basketball. And then the first time I went to test the inpainting feature, I wanted to add sunglasses to Tom Hanks. So I got this exact same animation but now Tom Hanks is wearing sunglasses in it. So let's go ahead and generate some new stuff just for this video. But before I get into the rest of it, I want to tell you about today's SP sponsor which is hostinger.com Hostinger is basically your one stop shop to get your website online. Not only is it providing you hosting and your domain name, but it will actually use AI to completely build your website for you. If you go to hostinger.com mattwolf click on claim Deal. You can set up an account for as little as $2.99 per month and if you scroll down and enter the coupon code Matt Wolf, it'll actually take even more off of your total. So check out how easy this is. Once you sign up for a Hostinger account, you on your homepage here, click Set up, click Start now and let's walk through the process. I'm creating it for myself. I'm creating it myself. 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Then I have a whole bunch of options here to go along with my text prompt. I can select the aspect ratio. I really like to use 16:9 because it looks really good. In YouTube videos, you can adjust the frames per second. The lower you bring it, the more it kind of looks like an old school animation. The higher you bring it, typically the smoother it is. So let's go ahead and leave it at 24. Here we have motion control, so we can have the video panning left, panning right, tilting up, tilting down, rotating and zooming. Let's go ahead and have it pan right and then let's do the strength of motion up a little bit. Let's go ahead and leave it at 2. Then we have some additional parameters here. We can add a negative prompt, we can add a seed if we want to, and then we can raise or lower the consistency with the text. So let's go ahead and bring it up a little bit and click generate. And here's what we got. It took less than a minute to generate, maybe about 45 seconds. And we have a purple alien on Mars eating what kind of sort of looks like a pizza. Say it kind of looks more like a calzone, honestly. Now it can also do video to video. So here's a video of somebody kayaking on a bay here. Let's go ahead and toss this video in and add a prompt with it and see what we get. So if I come down here, I could literally drag and drop this video. You can see it turns into a little area where I can drop it here. And now we've got this video and it's Going to maintain the same aspect ratio. If I click on modify region, you can see that it gives me this video. And let's say I want this kayaker to be like chased by a shark. I can select the area directly behind the kayak and I just put a great white shark swimming and see if I can get a shark just behind the kayak. Go ahead and generate that. And then here's our video with a shark chasing the kayaker. I don't know, I added a giant rock here with the shark coming out, but this took me three retries to finally get it to look decent. So a handful more retries, you can probably get the shark without the shark emerging from a rock. Now another thing that I really love about Pika is, is that you could keep on generating more and more stuff and they'll all just kind of queue up and generate one at a time. Let's test the image to video feature. For that I'm gonna use this image of a wolf that I have here. And just like Runway, you can just drop in an image and leave the prompt completely blank and see what it does. And it will get creative on its own. Here's what I got with our wolf. When I just animated it with no prompt, it kind of does a slow zoom in on the wolf. But we've also got some upscale features. So let's say we like this video of Tom Hanks wearing sunglasses on the basketball court. I can hit the three dots, click upscale and it will start to generate an upscaled version. We can also extend videos. So let's say I like this purple alien eating pizza on Mars. Let's go ahead and click add 4 seconds and turn it into a 7 second video of an alien eating pizza on Mars. And it adds this dialog box down here to add four more seconds to it. So let's go ahead and click this button to do that. Here's our upscaled version of Tom Hanks wearing sunglasses on the basketball court. And here's our 7 second version of a purple alien eating a pizza on Mars. You can see it just extended the video and made it a little bit longer, but it's the same quality. Now let's test out painting. For that, let's go to this northern lights scene from a camping ground below. I click on edit on this video. You can see down here we've got expand canvas and modify region. Expand canvas allows us to pick a different canvas size and it will fill in the gaps. It will do out painting in the gaps to fill in the rest of the video. So let's go ahead and do it as a 9 by 16 and expand the canvas to this view. Now let's test some inpainting. Let's take this video headshot that I made here. Let's edit this real quick. Modify region, select where my hair is and let's just go ahead and put purple hair and let's modify that region and let it generate. Here's our expanded view of the northern lights. You can see it added sort of a hill side below the tent and it also expanded the night sky with the northern lights. And if you're ready for some nightmare fuel, here's what it looks like when I inpainted purple hair on myself, even changed my eyebrows purple and severely whitened up my skin. But that is what happens when I inpaint purple hair onto my own face. So there you have it. There's really a breakdown of what Pika is capable of. We can do text to video and really that's where I think it shines the most, is the text to video. We can do image to video. That's where I've had some of the most struggle. However, uploading real headshots like my own headshot worked pretty dang well. There's also video to video, which works fairly well. We've got the ability to upscale your videos which works exactly like it should. You can add 4 seconds to your videos and you can do it a few times. I think up until about a 15 second video. You've got the outpainting feature which is one of the most impressive features, as well as the inpainting feature, which in my opinion is really where Pika shines. Text to video and inpainting and out painting. This is really the three things you're going to come to Pika 1.0 for, in my opinion. You can also adjust frames per second, adjust the motion of the videos, and you have the ability to retry and or reprompt any video you want until you dial it in. And what's really cool about Pika is right now, since it is free to use and because you can just generate a whole bunch of prompts and let them queue up and just process, there's really no downside. You can just generate a whole bunch of prompts, ideally one of like 10 are going to come out exactly the way you want it. So I've been really, really impressed with what it's capable of. I think it's the best text to video tool available and so far, really the only Inpainting and out painting video tool that I've been able to play with. And so as far as that goes, it's also obviously the best. But like I mentioned at the beginning of this video, let's go ahead and finish this off by me showing you how I made that intro. All right, so here's that intro that I made earlier. AI Video has gotten absolutely crazy lately, and I broke it up into a whole bunch of clips. And each clip here is less than three seconds, because Pika only does videos up to three seconds at the moment. So what I need to do is I need to export each one of these little chunks as its own video. And. And I'm going to edit each video individually. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and render this out here. And instead of rendering a single clip, I'm going to render individual clips. I'll go ahead and add to my render queue. And you can see it's going to render seven clips. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I'll go ahead and click render all. And now you can see I've got seven short clips that should each be three seconds or less. So now what I'm going to do is, one at a time, pull each one of these in and give each one a separate prompt to make the scene change a little bit with each little clip here. So I'm actually going to let the very first clip just be plain, and I'm only going to mess with the six clips after it. So the first couple seconds will be me normal, but then stuff will start to pop onto my head. So I will go ahead and pull this second clip in here, drop it here, modify region, and let's go ahead and put aviator sunglasses on. Wearing aviator sunglasses. That'll be our first clip. You can see it's generating here. Now I'll go ahead and pull in our second clip. And on this one, metallic humanoid robot. Here's our first clip with the aviators. Go ahead and pull in our fourth video here. Modify region, green mohawk, generate that. For our fourth clip, I'm going to repeat that process a little bit, but then for the final one, I'm actually going to change my background. What I want to do is I'm going to delete everything but the very last scene here. Then I'm going to go ahead and resize this to a vertical resolution, center my face on camera a little, little bit here like that. And then we'll let the AI fill in the left and the right and see what happens for this last one, I'll drag my portrait landscape one in here. Click Expand Canvas and turn it to a 16:9. Let's go ahead and use the prompt outer space and see how that fills that in. And you can see here's the various clips that I pulled together for this intro. By the time I actually released this, there's a chance I might have swapped it with some other ones just kind of playing around. But this was the process that I followed. I just broke it up into clips through each clip in, messed with the prompts a little bit until I got something that looked interesting. Now one final thing I do want to note before I wrap this video up. I was talking to somebody at Pika Labs and they mentioned that there have been a few people trying to impersonate Pika. Just be very, very careful that you're not getting hit by a scammer. Make sure if you are using Pika Labs you are doing it at Pika Art. That is the only official website. There have been some people on Discord trying to convince others that they're Pika and send them to different websites that are scams. So just be very, very careful because there are people out there that might not have the best intentions. So just keep an eye out for that. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. I'm loving Pika. I can't wait to explore even further. As I always say, this is the worst it's going to get. It only goes up from here. This stuff only gets better from here. Pretty crazy stuff. I'm totally nerding out. If you love nerding out about this stuff, make sure you check out futuretools IO. This is where I curate all of the coolest AI tools that I come across. I keep the AI News page up to date on a daily basis. I have a free newsletter once a week I'll send you just the coolest tools that I came across. And once a week I'll send you just the most important news in the AI world from the week. It's all 100% free to use. You can find it all over at FutureTools IO. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed making it. And thanks again to Hostinger for sponsoring this video. Don't forget to use coupon code Matt Wolf to get an extra 10% off your AI website builder over at Hostinger. So thanks again to them and thank you so much for hanging out Nerd now with me and playing with AI tools. 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