[HN Gopher] Generate videos in Gemini and Whisk with Veo 2
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Generate videos in Gemini and Whisk with Veo 2
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 189 points
Date : 2025-04-15 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| transformi wrote:
| So many bugs... Couldn't generate even one video on AI-studio
| (due to errors in the platform). Shame on Google for those poor
| releases.
| xnx wrote:
| This is amazing. I wouldn't think that something as
| computationally expensive as generating 8 second videos would be
| available outside of paid API anytime soon.
| delichon wrote:
| I think I would buy "yes" shares in a Polymarket event that
| predicts a motion picture created by a single person grossing
| more than $100M by 2027.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I think the obstacles there are distribution and IP rights. I
| think we will see content like that find widespread appeal and
| success but actually turning it into $100m in revenue requires
| having the copyright (at present, not possible for AI-generated
| content) and being able to convince a distributor to invest in
| it. Those both seem like really tough things to solve.
| delichon wrote:
| Purely AI-generated content -- with no human authorship -- is
| not eligible for US copyright protection. However if a human
| contributes meaningfully to the final output (editing,
| selection, arrangement, etc.) it becomes eligible. See Thaler
| v. Perlmutter (2023).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >is not eligible for US copyright protection
|
| Once industry adopts AI generation, which it will, a new
| law will be quickly signed.
|
| In a way, not allowing copyright of AI material really only
| serves a tiny group of people. "We want to empower everyone
| to bring their ideas to market, not just those with the
| ability to draw them" is not a particularly evil or amoral
| sentiment.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| As if the ability is not attainable, people want to be
| put on top of the mountain without any effort.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| When society climbs mountains, they eventually build
| elevators. Its a core functionality and the reason why we
| are so advanced. Just take a moment to realize how many
| peaks you already sit on top of, without even thinking
| about. Your home is overflowing with cheap wares from
| mountains ascended ages ago that you now have "no effort"
| access to.
| r58lf wrote:
| Yeah, people underestimate how hard it is to get a movie into
| a theatre AND get people to pay for a ticket.
|
| Hollywood can barely get any well made movies past $100
| million these days unless it's based on some well known
| franchise (minecraft, Captain America, Snow White) or it has
| some well known actor.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I think you might need qualifiers on that. Are we talking an
| unknown / unrelated person living in the proverbial basement,
| or are we talking a famous movie director? I could see
| Spielberg or Cameron managing to make something like that
| happen on their name + AI alone.
|
| If we're talking regular people, the best chance would be
| someone like Andy Weir, blogging their way to a successful
| book, and working on the side on a video project. I wouldn't be
| surprised if something along these lines happens sooner or
| later.
| xnx wrote:
| We've got a pretty good datapoint along that trajectory with
| Flow. Almost entirely one person and has grossed $36 million.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
| jsheard wrote:
| It was a small team for sure but not a one man show, there
| are 22 credits for the animation work alone, plus 13 more for
| sound and music, not counting the director.
| xnx wrote:
| > Almost entirely one person
|
| It is closer to one than number the staff of other animated
| films. It's a good data point to keep in mind as AI tools
| enable even smaller teams to do more.
| karolist wrote:
| Went to the cinema with my kids for the 2nd time to watch
| this one, was pleasantly surprised to read this movie was
| done using Blender, highly recommended.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| One person? What do you mean? It literally says in the wiki
| more than one.
|
| This isn't solo dev game project.
| silksowed wrote:
| very excited to play around. will be attempting to see if i can
| get character coherence between runs. the issue with the 8s
| limit is its hard to stitch them together if characters are not
| consistent. good for short form distribution but not youtube
| mini series or eventual movies. another comment about IP
| license is indeed an issue but its why i am looking towards
| classical works beyond their copyright dates. my goal is to
| eventually work from short form, to youtube to eventual short
| films. tools are limited in their current form but the future
| is promising if i get started now.
| jddj wrote:
| I came to the same sort of conclusion when watching Kitsune,
| which I think was one person and VEO
| https://vimeo.com/1047370252
|
| Granted, 5 minutes isn't 1h30 but it's not a million miles away
| either.
| xrd wrote:
| It's fantastic.
|
| I just watched Kitsune, thanks for sharing.
|
| It reminds me why Flow was so good.
|
| Flow was great because I could see the shader artifacts. It
| was the opposite of a Disney model, it was not polished and
| perfect.
|
| That's why I loved it. Disney would never do a movie with a
| plot like Flow. They would write and rewrite it and it would
| be a perfect example of humanity, but totally devoid of the
| humanity behind it.
|
| It is ironic that this new coming wave of AI generated (or AI
| assisted) films feel like they have more human craftmanship
| than Disney films, when honestly it is the opposite. Disney
| has incredible and brilliant animators, but that is all
| crushed behind the merchandising and gross behemoth of the
| Disney corporation.
|
| I used to love seeing independent films. Those art house
| theaters really only exist in places like Portland, OR these
| days. But, I'm excited about the next wave of film because
| it'll permit small storytelling, and that's going to be
| great.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| This actually so amateurish and cliche it's painful. The fact
| people like this shows that art never had a chance when the
| masses have no taste. This makes me depressed for artists and
| the future.
| jddj wrote:
| It won't be novel the 100th or 1000th or millionth time,
| and standards will rise accordingly. But for now it is, or
| at least 2 months ago it was.
|
| Someone created that relatively coherent 5min animated
| story largely by communicating with a computer in natural
| language.
|
| The masses have had plenty worse
| switchbak wrote:
| Well sure, but we're in the early stages here smashing
| bones together. When a few million bored teenagers bang at
| this, I bet you'll see perspectives you've never thought
| of. It'd be like having someone in the 1920's listen to
| Nirvana - just a completely different experience.
|
| Given the dreck coming out of Hollywood, I'm open to that,
| even if other folks have to wade through a million shitty
| videos for me to get it.
| msabalau wrote:
| Kitsune is great!
|
| I've been a VideoFX tester, and have made a couple of five
| minute shorts. You end up having to generate a lot of shots
| that you throw away. This is a lot easier to bear if you are
| tester without really strict monthly limits, or having to pay
| to get past them.
|
| Also, there are all sorts of things you have to juggle or
| sidestep related to character consistency and sound
| synchronization. They'll be also sorts of improvements there,
| but I suspect getting to 90 minutes isn't really a question
| of spending more time and generations. Right now I think a
| strong option for solo aspiring AI film makers is to work on
| a number of small projects, to master the art, and tackle
| longer projects when the tooling is better.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Everyone keeps ignoring supply and demand when talking about
| the impacts of AI. Let's just assume it really gets so good you
| can do this and it doesn't suck.
|
| Yes the costs will get so low that there will be almost no
| barrier to making content but if there is no barrier to making
| content, the ROI will be massive, and so everyone will be doing
| it, you can more or less have the exact movie you want in your
| head on demand, and even if you want a bespoke movie from an
| artist with great taste and a point of view there will be
| 10,000 of them every year.
| nmilo wrote:
| It will be like YouTube. Distribution will be hard and most
| of it will be slop but every now and then you'll discover
| something so good and so creative and it couldn't have
| possibly existed before that it makes the whole experience
| worth it. The best creative works are led by one person and
| I'm excited to see what people can come up with.
| yorwba wrote:
| And one of those 10,000 will have a multimillion marketing
| budget and people are talking about it online and remixing it
| into memes and it will make a lot more money than the second-
| most popular movie, even though there's no discernable
| quality difference.
| Asraelite wrote:
| It will basically be like the rise of indie games. Every
| now and again you get something like Among Us which is low
| quality but good enough to be enjoyable and with the right
| combination of luck and timing it becomes insanely popular.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Not just Among Us. You also get _Minecraft_!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Most of us have no idea what movies we want. The most
| delightful films are a total surprise (other than the drones
| who watch every Marvel film of course).
| barrenko wrote:
| To quote Nikita Bier, never underestimate how many people
| just want to watch Netflix and die.
| GloamingNiblets wrote:
| A good parallel is writing books. Books can cost little to
| write and publish, but their success is Pareto distributed,
| not Normally distributed.
| mlboss wrote:
| Writing book is really expensive. You have to think and put
| words on paper that engages the read. It is really hard.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| This is what Instagram and YouTube did and we got MrBeast and
| Kylie Jenner making billions of dollars. The cost of creating
| content is tapping record on your phone and the traditional
| "quality" as defined by visuals doesn't matter (see Quibi).
| Viral videos are selfies recorded in the bedroom.
|
| When you lower the barrier to entry things get more
| heterogeneous, not less. So you have bigger outcomes, not
| smaller, because the playing field expands. TikTok's inside
| was built on surfacing the 1 good video from a pool of 10s of
| millions. The platforms that surface the best content will be
| even more important.
|
| It's a little disheartening, I think, for people to think
| that the only reason they can't be creative is money, time,
| or technical skill, but in reality, it's just that they
| aren't that creative.
|
| So yes, everyone can create content in a world of AI, but not
| everyone is a good content creator/director/artist (or has
| the vision), same as it is now.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Will the AI itself never be a good content
| creator/director/artist?
|
| People are always out there tying to convince others that
| AI is better than humans at X. How close is it to being
| better than humans at being a content creator itself? Or
| how long before that threshold is crossed?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It will always be subjective. There will always be
| holdouts who will denounce any AI work as "bad" simply
| because it was created by AI.
|
| Even when AI is objectively better and dominates in blind
| ratings tests, there will still be a strong market for
| "authentic" media.
|
| For instance we already have factories that churn out
| wares that are cheaper, stronger, better looking, and
| longer lasting than "hand made", yet people still seek
| out malformed $60 coffee mugs from the local artistan
| section in country shops.
| darepublic wrote:
| I don't think Mr Beast is particularly creative. He makes
| common denominator crap that appeals to kids. I expect the
| same of Kylie Jenner
| motoxpro wrote:
| You may not like them, as another poster said, it's all
| subjective.
|
| That doesn't mean they aren't incredibly good at what
| they do and that millions (billions) of people have tried
| to do what they have and failed.
|
| One of the reasons it's "common denominator crap" is
| because the blob of the internet has 100s of millions of
| videos copying MrBeast and the Jenner/Kardasians created
| an entire generation of people that wanted to be
| influencers. Most of the copies are Slop.
|
| Once they are intrenched they can continue to produce
| "crap" as you call it because they have distribution, the
| copies don't work because they aren't novel, which makes
| people feel like it doesn't take talent and is the
| algorithms fault, until the next person to be "creative"
| gets distribution and the cycle repeats.
|
| There is just a lot less creativity than people imagine.
| It's not a right that we all have as humans; it's rare.
| 8.2 billion people on earth, 365 days in a year, 3
| trillion shots on goal, and only a few hundred novel
| discoveries, art creations, companies, and ideas come
| from it.
| panarky wrote:
| That was the story with CGI too, that there would be
| overwhelming supply that drives prices and value toward zero.
|
| And yet Marvel exists.
|
| Turns out in a world of infinite supply, value comes from
| story, character, branding, marketing and celebrity. Those
| factors in combination have very limited supply and people
| still pay up.
|
| I don't see any reason why AI-gen video is any different.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It's still quite difficult and extremely time consuming to
| create a visual effect. And the technique to film actors
| and blend them is additionally quite difficult. If you get
| to the point one person can make a movie, yes you will be
| limited by your own creativity, but the number of people
| who can do that is still a lot greater than the number of
| people who can do that, and manage a 200 million dollar
| budget production and get an end product that meets their
| vision.
| googlryas wrote:
| A lot of people can't actually say what kind of movie they
| want, until they see it. And even if there are 100,000
| releases every year in every genre, virality will probably
| still exist where even if random, one of those movies is
| going to get more popular than the rest and then everyone
| will "need" to see it.
| colesantiago wrote:
| My prediction is on track to this and this was made only 4
| months ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951
| delichon wrote:
| There may be a solo (not Han) movie good enough to compete in
| five years, but I doubt that Academy voters will be that
| welcoming of the tech that can obliterate most of their jobs
| by then.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Based on the training data being pop culture, we may even
| get a good Han Solo movie from tools like this. Starring
| young Ford.
| switchbak wrote:
| If AI can fix the terrible ending that was Game of Thrones,
| then perhaps it won't have been a complete waste after all.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Well text generation is way ahead of video generation. Have we
| seen anyone create something like a best selling or high
| grossing novel with an LLM yet?
| delichon wrote:
| That's why going from one person to zero persons will be so
| hard. But one Kubrick/Carmack and a bunch of AI could make a
| compelling movie now.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Me too. Sam Altman recently predicted that we will see a one-
| person unicorn company in the near future.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Whisk itself (https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk) was released a
| few months ago under the radar as a demo for Imagen 3 and it's
| actually fun to play with and surprisingly robust given its
| particular implementation.
|
| It uses a prompt transmutation trick (convert the uploaded images
| into a textual description; can verify by viewing the description
| of the uploaded image) and the strength of Imagen 3's actually
| modern text encoder to be able to adhere to those long transmuted
| descriptions for Subject/Scene/Style.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Google is the new Microsoft in the sense that they can Embrace,
| extend, and extinguish their competition. No matter what xAI or
| OpenAI or "anything"AI tries to build Google will eventually
| copy and destroy them at scale. AI (or A1 as our Secretary of
| Education calls it) is interesting because it is more difficult
| to protect the IP other than as trade secrets.
| mritun wrote:
| > Google will eventually copy...
|
| Weird take given Google basically invented and released
| through well written papers and open-source software the
| modern deep learning stack which all others build on.
|
| Google was being disses because they failed to make any
| product and were increasingly looking like Kodak/Xerox one
| trick pony. It seems they have woken up from whatever slumber
| they were in
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| They didn't entirely drop the ball since they did develop
| TPUs in anticipation of heavy ML workloads in the future.
| They tripped over themselves getting an LLM out, but
| quickly recovered primarily because they didn't have to run
| to nvidia and beg for chips like everyone else in the field
| is stuck doing.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Like MS, Google is ubiquitous - search is much like Office
| and DOS before that. Anything OpenAPI or the other AI
| competitors create would normally be protected by patents
| for instance. Not so with an AI models. Google has the
| clout/know how to responded with similar technology -
| adding it to their ubiquitous search. People are both lazy
| and cheap. They will always go with cheaper and good
| enough.
| harrall wrote:
| Google invented the technology.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
|
| OpenAI was the copycat.
|
| If Google had patented this technique, OpenAI wouldn't
| have existed.
| strangattractor wrote:
| How do you patented it? What specific "practical, real-
| world application" does AGI purport to solve? All these
| algorithms work by using massive amounts of data. They
| all do it the same way or close to the same way.
|
| "Algorithms can be patented when integrated into specific
| technical applications or physical implementations. The
| U.S. Patent Office assesses algorithm-based patent
| applications based on their practical benefits and
| technological contributions.
|
| Pure mathematical formulas or abstract algorithms cannot
| be patented. To be eligible, an algorithm must address a
| tangible technical challenge or enhance computational
| performance measurably.
|
| Patenting an AI algorithm means protecting how it
| transforms data into a practical, real-world application.
| Although pure mathematical formulas or abstract ideas
| aren't eligible for patents, algorithms can be embedded
| in a specific process or device." [1]
|
| [1] https://patentlawyer.io/can-you-patent-an-
| algorithm/#:~:text...
| torginus wrote:
| Why text? why not encode the image into some latent space
| representation, so that it can survive a round-trip more or
| less faithfully?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Because Imagen 3 is a text-to-image model, not an image-to-
| image model, so the inputs have to be some form of text.
| Multimodal models such as 4o image generation or Gemini 2.0
| which can take in both text and image inputs do encode image
| inputs to a latent space through a Vision Transformer, but
| not reverseable or losslessly.
| flkenosad wrote:
| Text might honestly be the best latent space representation.
| cubefox wrote:
| > This tool isn't available in your country yet
|
| > Enter your email to be notified when it becomes available
|
| (Submit)
|
| > We can't collect your emails at the moment
| smallnix wrote:
| Brave to make ads with the Ghibli style. Would have thought
| that's burned by now.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Looking at the video, I think there's shenanigans afoot. The
| anime picture they input as a sample image is more generic
| anime, but the example output image is _clearly_ Ghibli-esque
| in the same vein as the 4o image generations.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| No one has any morals or soul at this point. It's all garbage
| in, garbage out.
| byearthithatius wrote:
| Very impressive release compared to what was possible even a
| single year ago. It feels like we are in a great state right now
| with respect to ML where all the big companies are competing and
| pushing each other to make the tech better. This is rare nowadays
| in America (or in general).
| bk496 wrote:
| I wonder what takes more compute power: this or a blender render
| farm?
| torginus wrote:
| I am not really technical in this domain, but why is everything
| text-to-X?
|
| Wouldn't it be possible to draw a rough sketch of a terrain, drop
| a picture of the character, draw a 3D spline for the walk path,
| while having a traditional keyframe style editor, and give
| certain points some keyframe actions (like character A turns on
| his flashlight at frame 60) - in short, something that allows
| minute creative control just like current tools do?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| You can do image+text as well (although maybe the results are
| better if you do raw image to prompted image to video?)
| minimaxir wrote:
| Everything is text-to-X because it's less friction and
| therefore more fun. It's more a marketing thing.
|
| There are _many_ workflows for using generative AI to adhere to
| specific functional requirements (the entire ComfyUI ecosystem,
| which includes tools such as LoRAs /ControlNet/InstantID for
| persistence) and there are many startups which abstract out
| generative AI pipelines for specific use cases. Those aren't
| fun, though.
| nodja wrote:
| Dataset.
|
| To train these models you need inputs and expected output. For
| text-image pairs there exists vast amounts of data (in the
| billions). The models are trained on text + noise to output a
| denoised image.
|
| The dataset of sketch-image pairs are significantly smaller,
| but you can finetune an already trained text->image model using
| the smaller dataset by replacing the noise with a sketch, or
| anything else really, but the quality of the output of the
| finetuned model will highly depend on the base text->image
| model. You only need several thousand samples to create a
| decent (but not excellent) finetune.
|
| You can even do it without finetuning the base model and
| training a separate network that applies on top of base
| text->image model weights, this allows you to have a model that
| essentially can wear many hats and do all kinds of image
| transformations without affecting the performance of the base
| model. These are called controlnets and are popular with the
| stable diffusion family of models, but the general technique
| can be applied to almost any model.
| wepple wrote:
| LLMs were entirely text not that long ago.
|
| Multi modality is new; you won't have to wait too long until
| they can do what you're describing.
| volkk wrote:
| this is semi-relevant -- and I do love how technically amazing
| this all is, but a massive caveat for someone who's been dabbling
| hard in this space, (images+video) -- I cannot emphasize enough
| how draining text-2-<whatever> is. even when a result comes out
| that's kind of cool, I feel nothing because it wasn't really me
| who did it.
|
| I would say 97% of the time, the results are not what I want (and
| of course that's the case, it's just textual input) and so I
| change the text slightly, and a whole new thing comes out that is
| once again incorrect, and then I sit there for 5minutes while
| some new slop churns out of the slop factory. All of this back
| and forth drains not only my wallet/credits, but my patience and
| my soul. I really don't know how these "tools" are ever supposed
| to help creatives, short of generating short form ad content that
| few people really only want to work on anyway. So far the only
| products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet
| spam companies.
|
| The closest thing that I've bumped into that actually feels like
| it empowers artists is https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion
| that plugs into Krita and uses a combination of img2img with
| masking and txt2img. A slightly more rewarding feedback loop
| hu3 wrote:
| is there a tool to generate AI videos that doesn't change the
| original picture so much?
|
| Whisk redraws the entire thing and it barely resembles source
| picture.
| vunderba wrote:
| Wan 2.1 can do a decent job with i2v.
|
| https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/wan
| CSMastermind wrote:
| You want Kling: https://klingai.com/global/
|
| Everything else performs terribly at that task, though a bunch
| including Sora technically have that functionality.
|
| Google's tool forcing you to redraw the image is silly.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| 1: Press release about amazing AI development.
|
| 2: "Try it now!" the release always says.
|
| 3: I go try it.
|
| 4: Doesn't work. In this case, I give it a prompt to make a video
| and literally nothing happens, it goes back to the prompt. In the
| case of the breathtakingly astonishing Gemini 2.5 Coding - attach
| to source code file to the prompt "file type not supported".
|
| That's the pattern - I've come to expect it and was not
| disappointed with Google Gemini 2.5 coding nor with this video
| thing they are promoting here.
| siva7 wrote:
| you're using it wrong. change file ending to .txt instead
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm or a helpful advice?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's how you have to do it. The gemini model is excellent,
| but the implementation/chat environment seems like it was
| thrown together in a weekend as an afterthought.
|
| You cannot upload a .py file, but if you change the name to
| "main.txt" you can upload it, and it will automatically
| treat it as "main.py". Not sure how this hasn't been fixed
| yet, but it is google so...
| throwup238 wrote:
| On the contrary I had completely written off Google until a few
| days ago.
|
| Gemini 2.5 Pro is finally competitive with GPT/Claude, their
| Deep Research is better and has a 20/day limit rather than
| 10/month, and now with a single run of Veo 2 I've gotten a much
| better and coherent video than from dozens of attempts at Sora.
| They finally seem to have gotten their heads collectively
| unstuck from their rear end (but yeah it sucks not having
| access).
| martinald wrote:
| I really don't know why Google especially seems to struggle
| with this so much.
|
| While Google have really been 'cooking' recently, every launch
| they do is like that. Gemini 2.5 was great but for some reason
| they launched it on web first (which still didn't list it) then
| a day or so later on app, at which point I thought it was total
| vapourware.
|
| This is the same - I have gemini advanced subscription, but it
| is nowhere to be seen in mobile or app. If you're having
| scale/rollout issues how hard is it to put the model somewhere
| and say 'coming really soon'? You don't know if it's not
| launched yet or you are missing where to find it.
| ninininino wrote:
| As usual with Gen AI the curated demo itself displays
| misunderstanding and failure to meet the prompt. In the "Glacial
| Cavern" demo, the "candy figures" are not within the ice walls
| but are in the foreground/center of the scene.
|
| These things are great (I am not being sarcastic, I mean it when
| I say great) if and only if you don't actually care about all of
| your requirements being met, but if exactness matters they are
| mind-bogglingly frustrating because you'll get so close to what
| you want but some important detail is wrong.
| Zopieux wrote:
| No thanks. Just stop.
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