I Spent €8 On This AI Tool So You Don't Have To

I spent €8 on this so you don't have to. So this is potentially the coolest way to generate using AI images, videos, anything. This is a nodebased system from Freepick that allows allows you to prompt an image for example. Create an image and then add a style to that image and then edit or make a video out of it and then kind of like stitch these together all with these nodes. So these nodes you can imagine them as input output. So the input of this or the output of this node you connect it to the input of the other. So it's kind of as a reference. So you take this as a reference and then here you say what do you want to do with it. You can do this to not just make images as I mentioned you can even make videos and you press run and you make versions and all of these are connected. So it's in a visual canvas that looks really really nice. It's really well designed. In my head I would describe this as a nodebased multimedia transformer tool. So taking you know you might take an image and say hey make this im make this flower blue and then you're done with it all done. Download the image. What this allows you to do is you can take an image and you can say right make this blue and then in the next stage of the transition make this 3D and then it's you kind of got this multi-stage um manipulation of an image or a video or I don't know what the inputs were on there but you it could be a 3D model or something like that but it it just allows you to build these pipelines to manipulate images. And what I like is you could, let's say you apply a specific kind of treatment, like maybe you take a concept image from an artist and you always make different 3D models that you then put on your website. This is an amazing way to just have a pipeline where you can dump your image, which you always get, and it will run it through that pipeline and generate like six or seven different formats. And you know maybe it's something for a poster, maybe it's something that you know your website can use. Yeah, this is the new way to generate probably like marketing assets if we generalize it. What do you see here? So this is made in Figma by the way. This is made uh manually in Figma. How would you animate this in a animation software or even with code? After Effects probably. Yeah, probably After Effects. I'd probably use GSA probably. It would be easier for me, but you you'd have the 20 24 and then the four goes out and it gets, you know, slow smaller and the five comes up with a nice easing and something like this, right? And then maybe the five goes and the six comes. And this is what exactly I prompted the AI. And first I tried to prompt it directly using uh just just using my own imagination and my own words. Are you ready to see the result? I want to see the prompts. I want to see what I want to see the workflow before the result. I Well, I can't do this. Well, I'm sorry, David. I can't do this. I can't zoom in more than this um without revealing. So, I mean, I've seen the design. So, like, you know. Yeah. It's like create a smooth number animation. Okay, the 20 24 going to 20 25 and 6 and 7. Uh only change the last digit and the rest stays the same. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the space time continuum is um broken. the flux capacitor is is not quite ticky boo. Yeah. So I was like okay uh let's try it again. Okay. So this is another try and it's just like what what the hell is this? I was like, "Okay, let's ask Chad GPT to write the prompt." Like make a really long prompt and not much better. Like, okay, like the the two I've already got I've already got a hunch. I've already got a hunch. Oh, [laughter] is this a use case or is this you just saying how rubbish the tool is? No, this is [laughter] well the thing is I know like with so many other things these tools can do it but this is the use case that I right right now have and I just paid eight bucks for this yeah go on so same again here's another version and I just made different prompts I don't know what figured it out I figured it out create your first your first image will be the number five, right? Just the number five. And your first prompt will be have this have this number shoot off and and a gray number four or something like that. Have and and get that locked down. Get that first animation locked down just in isolation. Your second image, because this is the beauty of nodebased piping, right? Your second will be just a flat image of the 2025 or whatever. Then you would say merge those two. Merge the video and the image together into a video. That's I think there's there's where you got to think of when you talk about node. You've got to break down the the path in in logical chunks. What you reckon? But if I do this as well as I would just do it in Figma prototype that I never touch or I would do it in code, you know, you know, the the whole beauty of this would be to oneshot something like this because it does seem simple and I'm pretty sure there are enough examples of this exact ticker animation. This this is nothing like novel, new or groundbreaking. But maybe because how minimal it is, it is even more difficult because of the the minimalism. Well, you got to think about is the scalability of something like this? Is this something you do time and time again? Is this a long workflow that yes, it might take you long to set up in the first instance, but does it pay dividends in the in the future because you're just doing the same thing over and over again? Are you creating 60 videos out of one image? In that case, something like this would be really helpful. So, whilst I I know you're only showing like an example, and yes, you're right. It's not a valid um representation of why this tool sucks or whether it's brilliant because the you you're not wrong in what you're saying. It's just this that was never meant. You're comparing apples to oranges if that makes sense. Yeah. Um, I see this as as mass um mass output variances uh constantly doing the same thing or constantly doing multi-step processes and just chaining it all together and that's where I see this coming in clutch. No, I can't imagine like ads uh or have like let's say what mentioned like yeah product shots like we we looked at the finite stuff here what if we could like create layers and 3D and make them look like they were rendered in 3D or I mean with UI it might be more difficult but like with actual physical products that could be something. Um, nonetheless, this was my use case right now. And I have far more complex UI to animate uh for thumbnails. And I thought this one because this is a custom code, let's not animate it in in the UI, just let's do it in After Effects. It's faster uh for my team to do it. But apparently, yeah, we'll go that route because AI can't do it properly. And by the way, I noticed for all of them I was using the auto model. And I don't know which model that was. Maybe this was my mistake. Maybe I'm I suck at prompting. But any of these all of these prompts were different. Yeah. Um do they have VO? Because I think VO is is a good place to start with [snorts] again animating something that you don't want to affect the rest of the image with. So that might have been a good model to have. Yeah, I'm out of I'm okay. So this one already Yeah. In the direction. Yeah. But here's the issue. It's not like when if I write code, by the way, shout out. We we are over 100 um viewers. If it's with code, it's so much easier because of the deterministic uh nature of it. Like you see how the code runs and if you have a bug, you can change the bug and you know, obviously make it work. But when when we are talking about generative generative nature of things, you can't control it. It's generally you could tell it to output a code that does this though or you could tell it to output like I don't know whether it can but will output a uh after effects file that does this though. There there are probably ways to do it but you're totally right. Like it's a it's a black box. This is part of a larger conversation on my show Command AI which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web.