Synth Night in '87 (in the Haunted Vaporwave Woods)
A music video made (mostly) using Vidu's new ViduQ1 model and one of my Suno tracks.
Details and process under the fold
As a member of Vidu's creative partner program, I was able to participate in the beta and got a lot made during that window, so there will be a lot more about Vidu's new model soon.
Currently, the new Q1 model is a 1080p, 24-frames-per-second, 5 second model that functions on the image-to-video and text-to-video processes, with reference to video hopefully to come sooner than later.
I took an assortment of vaporwave landscapes I'd made in midjourney and used them as start-and-end point images, along with prompts along the following lines:
walk through POV footage, live action film of a surreal forest filled with strange glowing plants and fungus
With img-to-video, minimal prompting works fine for something like this.
The quality is a big jump from version 2, with a lot less blurring and smudging, especially with animation. For a lot of actions setting the movement amplification to large is needed, however, since Q1 is conservative with its movements.
In terms of quirks, start-and-end-frame image-to-video tends to produce a less crisp and less controlled result than just using a start frame.
As there is presently no "extend" function on vidu videos, the motion speed and carryover changes clip-to-clip, so doing a long shot like this one requires adjusting clip speeds, chopping the start and end frames, and the like. Even so how details are interpolated can change shot to shot, requiring a lot of tinkering to minimize the clip-transitions.
I added some overlays to assist with that, and the entire sequence is faster than the original footage in general. The dragon's fire-breath, too, is post-production compositing.
