Lightricks is bringing instant video-making capabilities to marketers and other professionals with its new, generative AI-powered platform, LTX Studio.

Ever since ChatGPT first dazzled us in late 2022 with its uncanny ability to engage in humanlike conversations on almost any topic, generative AI has become the hottest buzzword in tech. It all began with text generation, but it quickly evolved into text-to-images with the emergence of newer models such as Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Now, generative AI is attacking a new frontier with the development of next-generation text-to-video-based models, and from a marketing perspective, these are perhaps the most interesting of them all.

One of the most ambitious startups to take up the challenge of delivering high quality AI-generated videos is Lightricks, which has just announced the debut of its newest platform, LTX Studio. The company claims that LTX Studio has the ability to take a very basic outline of a video concept, and transform it into a high quality video fit for any TV commercial break.

Anyone can make movies

LTX Studio, which is now available in pre-launch preview, leverages generative AI and combines it with user-friendly editing tools to enable anyone to create professional video footage in a matter of hours or possibly even minutes, depending on how long they intend the video to be.

The product targets marketing professionals among other users, with its ability to quickly generate “cohesive and highly consistent visual stories.” To do this, it supplements its generative AI capabilities with a selection of “directorial tools” that can aid in writing scripts, camera control, character consistency and more.

Lightricks may not be as familiar a name compared to AI industry titans like OpenAI, Google and Meta Platforms, but the company is well qualified to take on the challenge of AI-generated video. The software developer is the creator of comprehensive, mobile-based editing tools such as Photoleap, Videoleap and Facetune, and it has prior experience with generative AI, having added the technology to those apps as early as mid-2022, in a move that predates the launch of ChatGPT.

For marketers, LTX Studio holds a lot of promise. The video production process can be a nightmare at the best of times, with challenges including extended concept development, high production costs, perfecting scripts, finding a skilled director and suitable actors and actresses, and post-production editing. With LTX Studio, marketers can overcome many of these obstacles and eliminate the need to hire any outside specialists, swapping that with an integrated platform that provides AI-powered assistance at every step.

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Video-making processes reimagined

LTX Studio, which is set to become generally available by the end of March, leverages generative AI to reduce friction throughout the ideation phase, transforming marketing concepts into a basic video treatment based on a simple plain language prompt. It can also assist with brainstorming, creating a storyboard, generating a script, and integrating the visual and sound effects needed.

Users will be able to create the perfect character for their videos, whether it’s a musclebound weight lifter or a drop-dead gorgeous model. LTX Studio’s character consistency tools make it possible to develop entirely unique characters, based on the user’s vision or an inputted image, and utilize them in various scenarios, while the camera control functionalities enable users to manipulate the camera angles and movement to achieve the perfect look and feel.

They’ll also be able to generate the ideal backdrop for their videos, whether it’s on a sun-soaked beach, a baseball field, a mosquito-infested jungle, an alien landscape or anything else they can think of.

In addition, generative AI vastly simplifies the editing process, making it possible to adjust the brightness and contrast on the fly and immediately see how it affects the scene, as well as color correction, overlaying music and more.

Not only does it allow creators to do what was basically impossible unless they had a budget running into thousands of dollars, but it does the entire thing much faster than was previously possible, with its algorithms capable of generating results in seconds. In this way, it means users can see the results of thousands of tiny adjustments in close to real-time, meaning the creative process remains uninterrupted.

The holy grail of generative AI?

Lightricks is hardly the only generative AI video generation game in town. OpenAI recently hit the headlines when it previewed its Sora text-to-video generative AI model that promises many of LTX Studio’s capabilities, although that model is more focused on rendering shorter video sequences than packaging several together in a cohesive manner. It’s also not clear when Sora will become widely available.

Google also offers an alternative in its Imogen video generating tool, but like Sora, Imogen is still in its research phase. On the other hand, there’s no need to wait to play around with Runway.ai’s video-generation platform, which also leverages generative AI, as it launched last year. Similarly, another startup called Pika Labs entered the race with the debut of its Video Command platform, which not only incorporates text-to-video, but also image-to-video – where you can upload an image and transform it into a video sequence – and video-to-video models.

Although marketers have other choices, none of those platforms look quite as compelling as the new Lightricks product. Creating a text-to-video model is one thing, but the holy grail lies in harnessing those models to generate truly remarkable, high-quality videos that won’t look out of place in a Super Bowl ad break. We can’t say for sure, but the brief example clips offered by Lightricks suggest that the company may be among the first to crack it.

If that’s the case, then LTX Studio may well be destined to become a key element of every marketer’s video production strategy. Those who’re intrigued by the prospect can sign up for its official waitlist here.