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Show HN: InstantVideos.org – short documentaries in ~30 seconds

https://instantvideos.org/
4•pw•1h ago
Hiya! So I've been playing around with having Claude make videos for a bit now even had some success posting the results to TikTok (and setup a whole pipeline so Claude can generate and post autonomously). With the release of Nano Banana 2 Lite, I was curious show fast I could make the generation, so last night I gave it a whirl and got down to around 30s for short-form video.

It uses GLM-5.2 fast via Fireworks to generate the scripts and image prompts and, like I said, Nano Banana 2 Lite for the images, gpt-4o-mini-tts for the narration, and ffmpeg to string it all together and add the Ken Burns zoom effect (which still has a shake I haven't been able to get rid of). The video compilation proved to be the blocker once the rest was in place, but I was able to speed that up by putting it on a 64 vCPU EC2.

The cost might be the most interesting aspect as the short form videos tend to be about 25 cents. Almost 90% of that is the images, which are 3.336 cents a piece. Of course, running the big 64 core EC2 to allow for the creation isn't cheap.

It seems like on-demand AI video is coming, and I thought this was an interesting demo of how close it might be in at least one narrow video domain.

Comments

pw•1h ago
I'm around to answer questions or receive feedback if anyone as any!
nickvec•59m ago
Fun idea! Hope it doesn't cost you too much to keep up depending on how much traction this thread gets ;)

One small quirk I noticed with the generated short video: for each new slide/photo, there is a very gradual "zoom in" effect that occurs, which causes text to jitter a bit and is a bit disorienting. Not sure if that is specific to the "The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 in Boston" prompt I used or not.

Also, is Claude involved in the video generation itself? I noticed the generated video has "By Claude" in the top left corner, but the logs seem to indicate that only GLM-5.2, Gemini Flash, and GPT-4o are involved (just curious!)

pw•46m ago
Yeah, that's suppose to be a Ken Burns style zoom but I haven't figured out how to stop the shake the should probably just remove it. And I need to remove the "By Claude" too. That's a remnant from porting from my internal framework for the [By Claude)(https://www.youtube.com/@byclaude) Youtube, TikTok, etc channels.
faangguyindia•54m ago
How would I create a video like this?

For example, I have several posts that explain concepts in detail, with supporting images. They're written in Markdown, and I keep refining them until I'm confident that the average person can read them and immediately understand the concept.

The problem is that text is becoming a less popular medium for learning, while short form videos are increasingly being used to explain the same ideas.

From what I can tell, this tool only lets you provide a prompt. Can it turn my existing Markdown posts and images into videos, or is it mainly intended for generating videos from simple prompts? I'm looking for something that preserves the explanations I've already written rather than creating something entirely new.

faangguyindia•44m ago
it works, but can u add different style of videos like this one:

Style 1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vGjrv2zjfsM

Style 2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6KoRHpAZ4zk

These are the two styles that consistently keep me watching. I can't really describe them well in words, so I linked the videos directly to avoid losing important details in the translation from visual format to text.

Maybe someone with more experience in video production can explain what techniques are being used here and why they're so effective at holding viewers' attention.

pw•40m ago
So this is really just a kinda proof of concept, but I'd be pretty easy to turn it into what you want. It sounds like you've already got both basically a script and images to go with it?
faangguyindia•30m ago
pw•29m ago
Ugh looks like I'm hitting my Gemini Tier 1 usage limits. Sorry!
Your project reminds me of something I built a while ago using Pollination.ai for images, Gemini Flash for script / captions / inserting transitions and all other editing, Google Cloud TTS for narration/voice, and FFmpeg drive by flash, back then Gemini Flash 2.5 (free) is what i used for these experiments. The result looked like this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IhGR8AC3a_g

Uploaded on sep 24, 2024.

I wasn't happy with how it turned out, so after making 3–4 videos I dropped the idea.

Later, I came across several different video styles that consistently kept me watching. That's when I realized what my videos were missing they simply didn't have the same ability to capture and hold attention.

But i never managed to generate those styles after dozens of attempts and gave up.

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