Limited Budget and Imagery Makes Video Ad Animation Challenging
We’ve worked with multiple clients who often have a limited image library with no video content or the budget to shoot footage, but still need to produce video ads to improve click-through-rates with their paid media campaigns.
Producing animated ads can take a lot of time and it often needs to be done on a tight timeline. In the use-case I’ll walk through, I needed to edit static images to incorporate an artistic flair via animation to quickly churn out a large digital ad set for a client.
Using AI Helped Us to Produce Video Ads Faster
When I saw all the new emerging AI platforms, I realized there was bound to be one that could help produce digital ads faster with less manual work adjusting keyframes and settings in a video editing software like Adobe After Effects. That’s where LeiaPix (AI platform) came in handy to help reduce a lot of the manual and repetitive production tasks!
LeiaPix is an AI Platform That Turns Static Images into 3D Animations
LeiaPix, created by Leia Inc., is an AI platform that turns 2D static images into 3D animations. It works by allowing users to upload images 1-by-1 and adjust settings that will impact depth map controlled movements. This kind of movement generates an animation style that gives a static image a sense of immersive motion. Once you’ve got a static image animated to your liking, the platform allows you to export it as an MP4 video file or GIF.
It is free to use as well, but only up to a certain level of resolution (720p) and the free export is watermarked so it’s not commercially usable. However, the platform is relatively inexpensive to buy credits for and will then provide high–res exports (up to 4k) without any watermarking and is free for commercial use!
See a side-by-side comparison of how LeiaPix animates a static image below:
Creating Animated Ad Assets With This AI Reduces Production Lift
At first glance, using this tool felt like it was too good to be true. The idea that I could animate an image once using this platform and then use it consistently across multiple ads was new for me.
The platform is relatively simple to use as well—it took about 10-15 minutes to explore all the settings and options. You can see what the default settings appear like in the image below.
It takes some trial-and-error to get an animation style that works for images with various foreground and background elements. So I did end up having to explore the other settings visualized below.
You can take it a step further and start to edit the actual depth map that the AI platform generates to create these effects—this is the most time consuming piece to work with if you have a visually noisy image with lots going on in the background.
Easily Create & Experiment With Diverse Animated Ad Visuals
Originally, I was seeking a tool like this because when animating static images to be more interesting in a video ad, I’d need to revisit the same repetitive tasks or pieces of it over-and-over for each image used in all ad variants to make each animation look consistent. This looked like me adjusting keyframes for an image’s size or location for multiple images across a large sum of ads.
Personally, this part of producing ads was just not my favorite since it was so time consuming. LeiaPix made it more fun for me to experiment with different animation styles with just a single click of a setting versus adjusting multiple keyframes and layers of an After Effects file. Overall, it made for a more engaging visual in the video ads too since LeiaPix offered easy ways to animate static images with techniques I couldn’t pull off as quickly in the turn-around time we had for these ads.
LeiaPix Helped to Speed Up Video Ad Production Time by 42%
In the client-case I used this tool for, I was tasked with creating 8 video ads using 6 static images that all needed to be manually animated and adjusted across different ad size variants. Typically, this task takes up a large chunk of time that could be spent providing strategic value elsewhere to the client.
Benchmark for Manually Producing Animated Ads from Static Assets
For reference, this kind of process would take me 3 hours to manually animate 6 static images and then adjust them across 8 video ads to be consistent. Some production folks may be able to do that faster, but for me that’s where I was at the moment. To factor all production tasks involved in completing 8 ads—I would usually spend 7 hours on this type of deliverable.
Using AI to Automatically Produce Animated Ads from Static Assets
LeiaPix made it so I only had to animate the image once and could then use the video files it gave me across all 8 ads without re-adjusting animation settings. To animate the 6 static images it took me 30 minutes total with this AI platform. Completing all the other production tasks with this step included took 4 hours, representing a 42% efficiency gain for speed of ad production.
It cost $7.99 to buy credits for this AI platform experiment to do what I needed and that yielded back nearly 3 hours I would’ve spent doing the manual editing.
Pros and Cons of LeiaPix for Paid Media Asset Production
Pros
- Gain more time and options to play with animation styles of static images
- Use the time efficiencies gained from this production task for more valuable strategic tasks
- Animate images once and done
- Create more engaging visuals
- Works great with images that are less busy in the background and have a strong focus of the subject in the foreground
- Relatively inexpensive in comparison to other AI platforms
- No ethical or commercial-usage concerns when using assets you already own (this AI platform isn’t an image generator, it’s an image augmentor)
Cons
- Limitation on image resolution, affecting image clarity at larger sizes
- Images with more detail in focus of the background will get dilated-edges that are not visually appealing and take time to fix in the depth map
- Still need to resize the video file within a program like After Effects to get a consistent look to all your different ad sizes
Speeding Up Video Ad Production by 42% With AI is a Win
If you’re a creative or paid media professional involved in producing video ad assets or even managing production budgets then this could be a great resource to consider adding into your toolbox when working with static images. Even with its drawbacks the platform will still help you save time and money on ad production.
Overall, I’d call the experiment with LeiaPix a win and it’s an AI platform I’ll consider using again in the future when similar use-cases pop up requiring us to animate static images for video ads. Since new AI platforms and tech advancements are popping up everyday, there are likely other platforms out there that can do something similar to work around the the cons listed above, so I’ll be exploring deeper into image production based AI platforms to find out.
Need help making your team’s paid media asset production more efficient? Let’s talk!
We Have More to Uncover Using AI in Digital Ad Production
Now that we’ve determined a method to produce video ads faster out of static images, what do we do next?
There’s a series of questions we’ve yet to answer, like:
- Does this AI platform improve ad performance with its creative animation styles?
- With the time we’ve gained by using AI for production tasks, what can we do with the dollars we saved?
Stay tuned with our Seer newsletter and find out as we dig deeper into that all with our upcoming creative experiments!
