Search for "AI product video" and most of what you find is a clip. A video model takes a prompt and returns eight seconds of a bottle turning in soft light. It looks good. It is not an ad. An ad has a product name spelled correctly, a cut that lands on the music, a line of text that says what to do next, and a length that fits where it will run. Somebody still has to do all of that, and that somebody is usually you, in an editor, at eleven at night.
This post is about the gap between the clip and the ad, and which parts of that gap DV4 closes from one line. We say where it does not, too.
What a product ad needs that a clip does not have
Take a plain brief: a 15-second ad for a ceramic pour-over kettle, calm morning mood, for the shop's home page. To ship it you need:
- more than one shot, so the video has a start, a product moment and a close
- the product name on screen, spelled right, in a readable size
- music that fits 15 seconds and sits under the picture rather than on top of it
- an end card with the one thing you want people to do
- a check that nothing in the shots is wrong before it goes out
A video model gives you the shots, one at a time, from one prompt each. The rest is production work. DV4 does the production work around the model. How the pipeline runs, step by step, is in From one line to a finished video. Here we stay with the ad.
The prompt: the product, the mood and the length
You write what you want to see. One line is enough: the product, the mood, the length and where it runs. DV4 plans every shot from that line, films each shot and hands you a finished video, with the sound, the music and the text in place.
A longer prompt helps when you know what you want. Name the setting, the colour of the product, the one feature the ad is about and the words you want on screen. DV4 keeps your words; it does not invent a slogan for you unless you leave the text to it.
Your own pictures of the product
A model that has never seen your kettle will draw a kettle. For a product ad that is not good enough, so on paid plans you can upload pictures of the product, up to four per video. A shot can start from one of them as its first frame or use it as a reference, so the kettle in the ad is your kettle: the same spout, the same handle, the same glaze.
If you have no pictures yet, the free plan still works from the prompt alone. That is the right place to test a concept before the product photos exist.
Shots that follow a plan
DV4 does not send your line straight to the video model. A planning model first writes a shot list: framing, camera movement and length for each shot, and the words that go on screen. Then the shots go to the video model one by one. The free plan makes up to two shots; paid plans make more, up to sixteen on the highest plan, with a video of up to two minutes.
For a product ad the plan matters more than the model. A wide establishing shot, a close product shot and a final shot with the end card is a structure that works for a kettle, a candle or a pair of shoes. DV4 writes that structure for you.
The product name as type, not as pixels
Video models draw letters badly. Ask one for a kettle with the brand on the box and you get a brand that is almost yours, with one letter wrong. For an ad that is the worst possible failure, because the one thing the viewer must read is the one thing that is broken.
So DV4 never asks the video model to draw text. Every shot prompt asks for no readable text at all. The title, the callouts and the end card are added afterwards as exact type, on paid plans, from the words in the plan. Your product name is set in a font, at a size that reads on a phone, in a place that does not cover the product. If you turn captions on, they come from the words actually spoken, burned in, with a captions file to download beside the video.
Music that fits the cut
An ad needs music that is the right length. A 15-second ad with a 30-second track fades out in the middle of a phrase, and everyone hears it. On paid plans DV4 composes an original instrumental for each video, made to its length and mixed under any dialogue. If you already have a track, upload your own soundtrack and it plays in place of the composed music.
Every shot checked before you see it
Video models make mistakes: a stray word drawn on a wall, a mouth moving in a shot that should be silent. On paid plans DV4 checks each shot before it goes into the video. Text recognition looks for letters the model drew by mistake. Speech recognition listens to the shot and compares what it hears with the script. The frames are checked for safety, in every job, on every plan. A shot that fails is made again.
When something in the final video is not as planned, DV4 tells you. With each result you see any flags, for example that the music was left out after a failure, so you know what you are looking at before you post it.
Landscape for the web, vertical for reels
Every plan makes landscape and vertical video. The home page gets 16:9; the reel gets 9:16. Resolution depends on the plan, from 720p up to 4K.
A 30-second 1080p video is usually ready in about five minutes. On paid plans you can start several videos of the same request at once and follow each shot as it is planned, filmed and checked, then keep the one you like.
What you still do yourself
DV4 does not know your product. You bring the pictures, the name and the one line that says why it matters. You decide where the ad runs, and you watch the result before it goes out. DV4 does not edit a video you already have, and it does not read your product from a web page: the input is a prompt, and on paid plans your pictures and your soundtrack. Brand kits and team seats are not in the product yet.
One more limit, on purpose. DV4 never makes sexual or adult content, and it never makes real public figures. Every request goes through the same safety checks, on every plan.
Start with a 15-second clip
The free plan needs no card. Write one line about your product and you can make a clip of up to 15 seconds at 720p: enough to see whether the concept works before you spend anything. When it does, a paid plan adds your pictures, the type, the music and the checks. You can make a product ad with DV4 today.
At Deep Variance the video model is one step among many, and each step is GPU time. Running those steps faster and cheaper is the other half of our work: we build the auto-tuning inference stack for open-source diffusion models. DV4 runs on the stack. The ad you make is the proof that it works.
Originally published on the Deep Variance blog.
