Quick LinksWhy Use an AI Text-to-Video Tool for Creating Videos? What Is VEED AI? How I Used VEED to Create a Social Media Video The Limitations of VEED AI VEED AI Creates Fun Videos, Not Professional Videos Key Takeaways Use dedicated AI video tools when unable to create content manually to save time and create engaging videos. VEED AI offers a free plan with limitations but includes various AI tools to create professional-looking videos. Utilize VEED's AI text-to-video feature to create social media videos, but be aware of limitations in editing capabilities and background removal.
I recently discovered VEED and decided to give its AI text-to-video feature a try to create a video for social media. With some video editing experience under my belt, I was curious to see how this tool would handle the job. Here's how it went.
Why Use an AI Text-to-Video Tool for Creating Videos?
AI tools are built into many video editing programs. While software like Premiere Pro and CapCut have both traditional and AI tools, sometimes it's worth using a dedicated AI video tool to create your video from scratch.
I decided to use an AI text-to-video tool because I'm unable to film or obtain specific video content and don't have the time to write a script or record myself. Successful social media videos typically contain B-roll footage, on-and-off screen narration, animated subtitles, relevant footage clips, and audio or music timed with the video.
AI text-to-video tools can do it all for me in a matter of seconds, so I can share my social videos and get on with the rest of my day.
What Is VEED AI?
VEED is a browser-based video editing tool. Although it does have many traditional video editing features, it has a large focus on AI video creation and editing features.
You can access VEED with a free plan, but your video output will have the VEED watermark. Paid subscriptions remove the watermark and include more features. VEED Lite is from $10 per month and Pro is from $20 per month, with enterprise options at custom pricing.
Most features on the Free plan are limited versions of what you get from the paid plans, such as a lower export quality and length, smaller storage or upload parameters, limited access to video and audio stock, and limited one-time use of most AI or editing tools.
The AI tools available on VEED help create fun, engaging, and professional-looking videos. You can use AI to redirect eye direction, remove backgrounds, enhance your audio, clone your voice, add AI avatars, create voices from text-to-speech, translate your voice into multiple languages, and create AI highlight clips from your videos. These AI tools sit among traditional editing tools such as subtitles, templates, and brand kits.
How I Used VEED to Create a Social Media Video
Whether you want to use all AI tools to create your social media video or you have some raw footage to import, you need a rough idea of what you want to create before you start. I own a pet-sitting business, so I wanted to create a video to engage with new prospective clients.
Decide What Type of Video to Create
When using VEED's AI text-to-video tool, you can specify the type of video to create: Social Media, Business, Generative AI, Training, or Other.
Under those options is where you can write the prompt for your video. You can be as vague or specific as you like, but AI typically works better when you give more details -- although equally, it misses the mark often when there are too many details that confuse the system.
I wrote a long prompt:
Business ad for a local pet-sitting service in the south west, UK. It isn't a corporate business, it's fun and relaxed. The services offered are pet and house sitting for all animals, dog walks, and pet drop-ins. The service is called Helyer's Happy Tails.
Add Style Elements
Firstly, I chose the aspect ratio for the final video. Since it's a social media video, I chose Portrait as the ratio, but there are also landscape and square options. You can resize the video later too.
Then you can choose the voice and face for your AI script. You can have a voice-only narration with no AI talking head, or you can choose a character to visualize the voice. There are dozens of options for male and female voices, ranging from formal to casual.
Finally, choose from over 20 styles of subtitles. Once happy with your choices, select Continue with script.
Generate and Edit the AI Script
Under your prompt -- which you can edit if needed -- you can choose the target audience for your video. VEED pre-selects based on the prompt, but you can select a new audience if it's not accurate.
Then select or confirm the tone. Mine automatically chose Friendly and Approachable, after I'd written in my prompt that the business isn't corporate, but fun and relaxed. That can be overridden, too.
The full video script appears in the preview on the right. You can edit it manually or even select Regenerate Script to get a whole new one. Read over the script to make sure it says what you'd like it to. Once you're happy, select Generate Video.
Open and Edit the AI Social Media Video
The completed AI video will be sent to your VEED workspace. Now, if you expected the AI video to produce a flattened and merged un-editable video result -- you'd be wrong.
The VEED workspace has a timeline, layers, and editing tools. Layers include subtitles, a talking head, audio, video footage, and studio background. You can still use more AI tools, as well as some more traditional video editing tools, to get your perfect result.
There are animations, adjustment settings, playback speed, volume, audio fade, split, and voiceover options. You can add more media and audio -- from stock or self-recorded -- and add or change the text and other elements. You can also detach the audio and replace the video.
The extra AI features in the workspace include removing background noise from audio, centering the eye contact of any human in the video, background removal, green screen effect, magic cut to remove filler words and sounds, and a silence remover.
Here is my finished video:
The Limitations of VEED AI
I'm not 100% happy with the generation, but I am impressed with how much the VEED AI text-to-video tool supplied. And I'm equally impressed that the video is in layers on the timeline -- although I didn't find it easy to edit much of each layer.
Using the AI-narrated model is cool, but it renders with a gray background behind the AI model, covering up any other video footage in the background. This looks very amateur. The AI background removal tool changed the gray background into a black background -- leaving my video with the same problem. There's no way to cut out the talking head to float on other video footage.
After exporting my video, once I'd resigned myself that there would be a hideous background around the AI model, the exported video did have the background removed. So you might not know if it has worked until you go to export your video.
When the script was generated, everything was spelled correctly. When the video was generated, the subtitles that appear on the video used incorrect spellings or homophones of words from the script. The audio sounds correct, but the spellings merged incorrectly -- so don't rely on the script being correct when generating subtitles. Luckily, you can easily edit the subtitles.
There are more limitations to VEED; it isn't a comprehensive video editor and even though there are many tools, they're quite basic. I prefer using CapCut's AI video editing tools, which are available on mobile and desktop, unlike VEED.
Uploading your own media and using that alongside the AI features would be the best way to use VEED successfully. But relying solely on its AI tools and text-to-video feature likely won't result in a video you'd be proud to share. You can only export the final video, so you can't save the live file and edit the video with better software.
VEED AI Creates Fun Videos, Not Professional Videos
I did enjoy using this AI text-to-video tool. It's still relatively new technology, so it's fun to explore and see what can be done and find out the limitations. I had higher expectations, due to seeing an abundance of obviously AI-generated videos across my social media feeds.
The AI results are impressive, but the video editing tools were lacking. I would have liked to be able to fix up the video more than VEED provides tools for -- such as better background removal and a better interface. I wouldn't use my generated video on my social media feed, except for fun.
