This AI tool generates animations from text, images or videos

Stable Animation SDK by Stability AI helps artists create video assets.

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This AI tool generates animations from text, images or videos

Coca-Cola used AI for their amazing "Masterpiece" commercial, in which famous paintings come to life. The ad was created with the help of the Stable Animation SDK by Stability AI. This tool uses Stable Diffusion models to generate animations.

Why it matters

According to Water & Music, artists and their teams are heavily interested in AI tools for visual asset generation. With the demanding requests for video content, an AI tool that helps artists create animations could be a helpful solution.

How it works

Stable Animation currently supports text-to-animation, image-to-animation, and video-to-animation. Check out StabilityAI's Animation Handbook Google Doc for examples and workflow.

Create animation from text input

The most important parameter for basic text-to-animation is animation_prompts which assigns a start frame for each text input.

{
  0: "An orange cat on a white background, at daytime, sunny, realistic",
  24: "A purple cat on a grey background, in the evening, candle light, realistic",
  48: "A neon yellow cat on a black background, at night, flashing neon lights, realistic",
}

Other important parameters include max_frames and height/width. These parameters affect what you pay for your output. Standard values are 72 frames (12fps) and 512x512.

The prompt above results in this beautiful animation, which cost me 27 credits ($0.27) for a first try:

Yes, but..

• My first try is not that good, but better text-to-animation prompts, image-to-animation, and video-to-animation may provide better results. The Coca-Cola commercial proves that.

• As with all AI tools, learning how to write good prompts takes time. It's a skill on its own.

• Stable Animation is not cheap. When you create an account, you will receive 25 free credits, but that's not enough to generate an animation.

• With generative AI models like Stable Animations, there are always questions of copyright infringements regarding how the Stable Diffusion models are trained.

Take action now

Stability AI, and its new package Stable Animation, are not that difficult to install. Still, you need some basic knowledge about the use of command-line interfaces (such as Terminal on macOS) and coding languages (such as Python or JavaScript).

Here’s what I did on my MacBook using Terminal:

1. Install Python via Homebrew:
   brew install python

2. Install ffmpeg via Homebrew:
   brew install ffmpeg

3. Create an account on dreamstudio.ai
   Buy some additional credits if you want to; I bought 2.000 credits for $20 (ex VAT).

4. Install the Stability AI Animation SDK:
   pip3 install 'stability_sdk[anim_ui]'

5. Launch the UI:
   python3 -m stability_sdk animate --gui

   1. You’re asked to enter an API key. Copy this from your DreamStudio dashboard and paste it here.

   2. Next, you see where the UI is running. Open this URL in your browser.

You’re ready to generate some animations!

Go deeper

• Stability Animation docs (Stability AI)

• Stability AI releases Stable Animation SDK, a powerful text-to-animation tool for developers (Stability AI)