Google unveiled its latest AI tool for video generation, called Veo, at the Google I/O 2024 live event. Veo is described as offering “better consistency, quality and output resolution” compared to previous models – and it’s one of the more intriguing announcements from this year’s Google I/O show.
Generating video content with AI is nothing new; Tools like Synthesia, Colossyan, and Lumiere have been around for a while, riding the wave of generative AI’s current popularity. Veo is just the latest offering, but it promises to deliver a more advanced video generation experience than ever before.
To bring attention to Veo, Google has recruited a gang of software engineers and filmmakers, led by actor, musician, writer and director Donald Glover (of Community And Atlanta fame) to produce a short film together. The film wasn’t actually shown at I/O, but Google promises it will be “available soon.”
As someone who simultaneously doubts generative AI in art and is also a big fan of Glover’s work (Awake, my love! is in my personal top five albums of all time), I’m cautiously excited to see it.
Eye spy
Glover touts Veo’s capabilities on the basis of speed: this is not a takedown of human ideas, but rather a tool that can be used by creatives to “make mistakes faster,” as Glover puts it.
The flexibility of Veo’s fast readout is an important point here. It is able to understand clues in text, image or video format, paying attention to important details such as cinematic style, camera position (for example, a bird’s-eye view or a sped-up shot), elapsed time on camera and lighting types. It also has an improved ability to accurately and consistently represent objects and how they interact with their environment.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis demonstrated this with a video of a car driving through a dystopian cyberpunk city.
It can also be used for things like storyboarding and editing, potentially expanding the work of existing filmmakers. Working with Glover, Google DeepMind researcher Kory Mathewson explains how Veo allows creatives to “visualize things on a time scale that is ten to a hundred times faster than before,” accelerating the creative process by using generative AI for planning purposes .
Veo is debuting as part of a new experimental tool called VideoFX, which will soon be available to beta testers in Google Labs.