How to Make Video with AI Tools

The 30-second clip that took three hours

You export a 1080p clip from your phone, spend 90 minutes on cuts and color, then discover the audio drifts out of sync by 400 ms. That exact friction repeats every time a creator tries to build short-form content without AI.

Traditional timelines force you to handle every frame, keyframe, and transition manually. Most stock footage libraries still charge per second and deliver generic lighting that clashes with your scene. Even after the edit, lip-sync fixes often require a second pass in a dedicated app.

Flixly routes the same request through 50-plus models so the first output already carries motion, audio, and captions. Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1, Wan 2.7 and Sora 2 sit behind single buttons at Text to Video and Image to Video.

Why prompt-only workflows still miss the mark

A plain text prompt sent to a free tier model returns 4-second loops with jitter on hands and inconsistent character faces across shots. Credit costs stay low only because the model drops resolution to 720p and skips audio entirely.

Reference images help, yet most platforms require separate uploads for face, outfit, and background. Flixly stores a single character reference that persists across Reference to Video and Video to Video jobs.

The workflow that ships a finished 15-second short in under four minutes

1. Open the dashboard and select Text to Video. Choose Seedance 2.0 from the model list.
2. Paste a 12-word prompt that includes subject, action, and camera move: "woman walks through neon Tokyo alley, tracking shot, 24 fps".
3. Set duration to 15 seconds and aspect ratio to 9:16. Add the same character reference image used on prior clips.
4. Enable Auto Captions so the system burns text directly into the file at export.
5. Submit the job. Generation finishes in 38 seconds on average for a 15-second 1080p file.
6. Preview the result, then route the output to Lip Sync Video if any spoken lines need alignment.
7. Download the MP4 or send it straight to Shorts Generator for platform-specific re-exports.
8. If the motion feels stiff, regenerate only the middle 5 seconds with First to Last Frame to keep head and tail intact.

Concrete settings that reduce retries

The table above comes from 120 logged generations run between March and May 2026. Numbers shift with queue load but stay within 15 % of these medians.

Edge cases and hard limits

• Prompts longer than 180 characters are truncated; keep the core action in the first 40 words.
• Voice cloning requires a 12-second clean sample; shorter clips produce pitch drift above 8 kHz.
• 9:16 exports from Shorts Generator add 1.5 seconds of padding at head and tail to meet platform auto-loop rules.
• Reference images must be under 4 MB; larger files are rejected before the model queue.

When the output still shows jitter on fast hand movements, switch the model to Veo 3.1 and add the phrase "slow motion" to the prompt. That single change cut hand artifacts by 70 % in our internal test set.

FAQ

How many credits does a 15-second 1080p clip cost with Kling 3.0? Kling 3.0 averages 15 credits for a 15-second 1080p file that includes generated audio. Prices appear on the job summary screen before you confirm.

Can I keep the same character across multiple AI videos? Yes. Upload one reference image once, then select it in every new Text to Video or Image to Video job. The character ID stays attached to your account.

What happens if the generated audio drifts out of sync? Send the file to Lip Sync Video. The tool accepts the existing video and a new voice track, then realigns within a 200 ms window.

Does Flixly support 4K exports today? Current models output 1080p. 4K jobs are queued for a future update scheduled after June 2026.

How long does voice cloning take on a 12-second sample? The cloning step finishes in 22 seconds on average and produces a voice model usable for any length of Text to Speech generation.

Text to Video is the fastest way to run the full workflow right now.