Cinematic AI Video: Mastering Pika Labs (Beginner to Advanced)

hi everyone today we're taking a deep dive into Pika Labs the AI video generator that as of now you can use for free Pika has recently updated with a few new features that I think are real game changers and elevated up to a pretty remarkable level So today we're going to take a look at the platform as a whole we're going to go over best practices for prompting as well as every command that you can possibly use in Pika and I've got some advice from some other Pica power users to pass along to you as well alright and on that note let's dive in so starting from the ground floor Pika is an AI video generator in which you can either use text or image prompts to generate video those videos will be about four seconds long and run at 24 frames a second Pika is Discord based there's a link to join the server down below once you have joined you'll find a number of generation rooms over here in Creations simply Join one of those and when you're ready to start prompting you simply come down to the text box and hit forward slash create alternatively you can now message the Pika bot who will then slide into your DMs acting as sort of a private generation room the way to do this is if you come up to the right hand side of the screen um possibly the member list might be hidden for you so just make sure that hide member list is not toggled on the Pika bot will be in the top right corner simply right click and then message the bot that said if you're just getting started with Kika I always kind of recommend hanging out in some of the generation rooms at least to start with just so that you can kind of get an idea of what Pica is capable of generally I've found that most people in the generate rooms are actually very friendly if you're running into trouble they are more than willing to help you out and if you have a question about how they accomplish something they're usually willing to give you some tips and pointers prompting and Pika can be broken down into three areas you have text prompting you have image prompting and then you have your perimeters we're going to get into image prompting in just a minute but I wanted to start off with some basic text prompting as you can see the prompt structure here would be forward slash create followed by a description of the video you want to create followed by the parameters and we'll be also be going over all the perimeters very shortly so as I always say when it comes to prompting there is no right or wrong way to prompt that said I do think that there's certain information and kind of a structural style that does help the AI bot parse the idea that you're looking for again none of this is set in stone this is just sort of how I visualize a prompt beginning with medium that would be something like cinematic film 3D animation 2D animation Etc style you might actually think of as genre I feel that Pika responds fairly well to that so in this case action film drama film maybe even sci-fi film style buy and then including a filmmaker I find does not actually have that much weight in Pika Style by and then dropping a filmmaker's name tends to be a little less effective in kiga much like how in mid-journey if you name drop say Quentin Tarantino you're likely to get someone that looks like Quentin Tarantino in your output the same goes for Pika scene describe describes who your character is and what the location of the scene is while action describes what that character is doing or what is happening in the scene modulate the final area is something that I like to think of as token keywords that will affect everything that came before it so these are for atmospheric type effects like rain fog even lighting horror film lighting sci-fi lighting that sort of thing so let's take a look at two just straight text prompts and see how they come out via Pica so beginning with cinematic medium shot crime film a man wearing a black suit in I forgot put a in New York diner drinking coffee 1960s aesthetic we get this and this is not bad I actually kind of like it a lot although it is weird that he's chewing gum and drinking coffee at the same time I will say overall it definitely leaned into the 1960s aesthetic and has kind of a like Rat Pack kind of vibe to it whereas in the initial prompt I was kind of thinking more like a Martin Scorsese film so I wanted to play around with an exterior establishing shot that then we could lead into the inside of the diner with our bubble gum chewing coffee drinking uh mobster so I rolled this up which I thought was actually hilarious because it's a diner named crime it's a terrible idea for a secret hideout for gangsters as another example this is Cinematic still dramatic film close up a young fisherman on a boat looks loggingly at the woman he loves smiling rain falling yes I believe in the power of love what you want to fight about it so anyway we end up with like Jonah Hill and a young Sandra Bullock which is a very strange movie now I will say it will take you a number of re-rolls to get a decent output for example this is another one that we did with the same prompt uh that did not come out so great or this one which actually works really well in terms of what I was looking for if not for that weird woman lurking in the background she's a real mood killer back there I think her name's Becky while I will say that obviously image prompting is kind of the op Powerhouse of Pica at this point you can still get some really interesting and cool stuff out of straight text prompting I think it works particularly well when you're asking for kind of nature overhead aerial shots or something like this which I picked up from the door Brothers The Prompt here was painted Style by Van Gogh a man sits on a train looking out the window as the countryside passes this was something that looks really really nice natively within Pika text prompting when it comes to text prompting in Pica there are a number of called shots that you can try out this is a list of shots that have been known to work within Pika and as a quick FYI you don't need to screenshot this or hurriedly write it down all of this is available in a free pdf that is over on gumroad the link is down below that said if you would like to leave a donation it is highly appreciated especially considering I'm still dealing with these stupid YouTube invalid traffic bug which me means YouTube's probably only give me like a dollar 87 for this video finally patreon and YouTube supporters you guys already have this PDF okay moving on let's go check out image prompting so image prompting obviously as the name implies allows you to upload an image that Pika will then use for contextual Clues and inspiration in its output so I will say that image prompting is not necessarily the most intuitive but you do get used to it very quickly uh you simply forward slash create and then once the prompt box comes up you'll see this plus one more just click that and then the option for image will be here click that and now we can upload an image dragging it into Pika we still have the option to text prompt as well that said because a lot of our contextual Clues are already in the reference image we don't need to spend a lot of time describing the character the setting that sort of thing we can really just sort of concentrate on action by simply saying the man looks up and smiles and running that as a prompt with our image prompt results in this which is pretty good um smile I think that whoever he's smiling at is not going to be making it to the end of the movie so sure I do think that the mid-journey assisted image prompted outputs probably look a little more aesthetically pleasing than the straight text outputs but again there is kind of a neat charm to the fully text generated versions I mean it is all just sort of what you're looking for I should add that there is also a new animate feature you just forward slash animate and then you can drop any image in this is a mid-journey Batman image that I just rolled up and just rolling in a straight animate we get this uh it appears Batman's just standing on a rooftop muttering to himself because he is a crazy person that dresses up like a bat and beats people up in the middle of the night he is a crazy person we are going to spice that Batman animation up as we hop into the next section on commands big thing to keep an eye out especially if you're a mid-journey user when you are issuing commands in Pika that it is one dash followed by the command perimeter unlike mid Journeys dash dash so Pika now outputs natively at 24 frames a second so taking this which is an image reference from a thumbnail that I never ended up using it's kind of a cyberpunk robot and running that through Pika standard we get this so it's a little on the wonky side with the arm but it'll serve as an example and now here it is with the command Dash FPS 10 so 10 frames a second you'll also note it's not the same video there is a way that we can do that via seed we'll get to that in just a minute so next up is motion and this obviously controls the amount of motion your overall video has the default is one and you can control it from zero to four so zero if you want no Motion in your video output or four if you want a bunch surprisingly you can now get some pretty good results maxing out motion to four uh Pica previously would get pretty wild if you crank the knobs up that high but this is our fisherman couple in love once again uh with a motion of four and yeah it looks really good our guidance scale which is issued with Dash GS and runs from 8 to 24 with a default value of 12. controls how much Pica is listening or relying to your text prompt we'll have some advice on the guidance scale sweet spot coming up pretty soon but as a general spoiler it seems to be around 12 to 15. next up is negative prompting and I think this is actually a pretty big deal in Pika in order to issue a negative in your prompt it would be Dash energy for negative followed by a quotation mark all of the tokens you do not want to see and then closing it out with a quotation mark the negative prompts that seem to work work well are kind of in that older stable diffusion style I do in the PDF have an example of a pretty good base negative starter which includes ugly blurry deformed multiple limbs pixelated static fog cartoon vector art et cetera et cetera and then you can use that as sort of a base to add and subtract depending on what your needs are so applying some of these Concepts this is a mid-journey image that was then brought into Pika with the prompt woman takes a deep relaxing breath winds slowly blowing hair uh blowing in the wind with a motion of two we get this which I think is actually pretty good but now let's see what happens if we add our negative prompt to it as well so rewriting the same prompt only adding in the negative prompt as well we get this which I think is a lot more coherent and stable aspect ratio which is a concept I'm sure all of you are familiar with is just simply Dash AR followed by you know the number colon number now this only really applies when you're doing a text prompt if you're doing an image prompt uh Pica is just going to take the aspect ratio of your input image seed which is Dash seed followed by the number uh it doesn't really operate the same way you probably think it does if you're used to working with seeds in mid-journey when you're working with a seed and Pica you can't change your prompt nor your negative prompt so for example with our woman taking a cleansing breath uh here we couldn't change the background to be high noon in a desert now I should say you can try it just probably won't work the perimeters that you can change are things like the motion or guidance scale or things coming up in our next section which is the latest edition and is really really cool and that is dash camera dash camera is the latest function in the Pika toolbox and it is really cool because it gives you you a lot of control over the camera movement so for example taking our Batman animated output from earlier and adding in a dash camera pan up and left which you can do you can add multiples in there as long as they're not conflicting like up down or left right we get this which is a pretty cool movement it works really well with landscape type images like this is obviously a very 80s anime Ghibli kind of magical castle and then adding in a camera of up and right gives us this actually there's some really nice parallaxing with the trees in the foreground as the camera turns this is yeah it's really really nice this is our previous cleansing breath output with all of our negative prompts and then adding in a zoom out and we get this which is really really lovely sway Molina tested out some camera moves and gave us this which actually if I look at this for too long I get a little nauseous but you can see that it works pretty well Tiber white create this kind of tree seception effect which is actually really cool I could see this being utilized in you know a nolan-esque film overall I think the camera controls in Pika are going to be a pretty big deal as you can see in this video that Steve Mills did we have the ability to now really truly explore a location or space on the last page of the PDF I have collected some advice from members of the Pica Community it does begin with mine which is uh roll a number of times at least three times on one prompt before you move on because Pika does tend to get better as it generates these same prompts over and over once you actually hit the third one and you're still having problems you can hit this remix button and then begin adjusting your prompt from there I'm not going to read each one of these because you know the text is there but Tiber white who we saw earlier with preception I had some advice on prompting to the bot as a explain it to me like I'm 5 Tom Blake has some advice on motion controls Crystal wizard in the Pika Discord had some advice on prompt length and microphone is also on the Pika Discord had some advice on negative prompting as well as a prompt formula that gave us this video so all that advice is definitely worth reading through again you can download the PDF over on gumroad it is completely free so hopefully you found that helpful if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below or you can swing by the channel Discord that is also linked below and thank you for watching and I thank our supporters for supporting my name is Tim [Music] foreign

Channel: Theoretically Media

Views: 63,393

Keywords: Pika, pika ai, pika ai video generator, pika ai tutorial, Pika Ai tutorial, free ai video generator, free ai video maker, free ai video enhancer, ai video generator, ai video, ai video tutorial

Id: 0NRT7K3YkPI

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023