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How to quickly create and generate animation using Adobe Firefly
AI. Artificial Intelligence. It’s pretty much everywhere these days, waiting for a prompt from you to speed up your workflow and enhance your creativity. So important is this technology that every major company has developed their own AI it seems, and Adobe is no exception.
Adobe Firefly has been around since March 2023, and its capabilities have increased over the years, and I’m here to show you how to use it to create engaging video clips.
Adobe Firefly: Pricing & plans
Firefly offers a wide range of features, from turning text to images, expanding an image beyond its original boundaries, generating speech and soundtracks, and of course, creating video - the reason why we’re here.
It is possible to try Firefly for free and kick its tires as it were, but generating video isn’t part of that deal: you need a subscription to take advantage of that. If you already pay for Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pro plan, you’re all set, as Firefly is included with it, but if access to most of Adobe’s professional portfolio is just too rich for you blood, there are Firefly-only tiers you can check out instead.
These are Standard, Pro, Pro Plus, and Premium, ranging in price from $10 to $200 a month. Adobe regularly offer discounts, especially for the top tiers, so do check their site when you’re ready to take the plunge.
All tiers grant you access to video generation, but there is a cap on how many you can create each month: Standard is 20 vids, Pro, 40, Pro Plus, 100, and Premium has no limitations.
As you may be aware, there’s another restriction to AI generation: credits. Everything works on credits on top of your monthly subscription, and the more you pay each month, the more credits you’re given. These range from 2,000 for Standard, up to 50,000 for Premium. Be aware that your credits don’t roll over - any unused ones are lost when your new allotment arrives.
If that’s not enough for you, additional subscriptions exist to add more credits to your account. $10 a month will get you an additional 2,000 credits, $30 for 7,000, $50 for 10,000 and $200 for 50,000. If you really get into AI generation, it could end up being quite expensive.
Each tier comes with a seven-day free trial, which allows you to check everything out - even video creation - and as long as you cancel your subscription before that deadline (should you decide this isn’t for you after all), you won’t owe Adobe a penny.
But enough about all these financial considerations! Let’s see what digital video wonders await with Adobe Firefly!
Adobe Firefly: Where to find it
Firefly is integrated into many of Adobe’s professional apps, but it’s also available directly from Adobe’s website.
To find it, go to adobe.com, click on ‘Creativity & Design’, and select ‘Adobe Firefly’ from that drop down menu. From there, go to the ‘Generate’ menu, and you’ll find various video-related options. We’ll be looking at all three: ‘Generate AI Video’, ‘Generate Video From Image’, and ‘Generate Animation’.
Adobe Firefly: Generate AI Video
Choosing the option to generate an AI video leads us to a really simple interface. Take away the large font and basic video tutorial, and you’re left with a text field with a ‘Generate’ button. Sure, there’s also a dropdown menu from which you can choose either ‘Video’ or ‘Image’, but since we’re after video, and it was already set to that, we could easily ignore it.
The moment I clicked on ‘Generate’ however, everything changed. First, I needed to log in - not surprising since I’m going to need to spend some of my precious credits.
Once I’d typed in my email and password, I was then presented with a more complex-looking page, containing a host of options. I could ignore them all and click on ‘Generate’ once more to begin the process, but aren’t you curious about what each parameter does? I know I am. Come on: let’s check them out.
Top of the sidebar on the left is ‘General Settings’. I’ll look at each option in reverse order. The last one allows you to add ambient sound and relevant foley to your generated video. It doesn’t seem to increase the number of credits being used to create your idea, so why not include it?
Next is the duration of the video. You have three choices: 4, 6, or 8 seconds. This will affect the credit cost. If 4 seconds costs 200 credits, 8 will be 400. Thankfully, it’s simple arithmetic.
Frames per seconds is locked in at 24, the aspect ratio is either Widescreen or Vertical, and resolution is simply a choice between 720p and 1080p. None of these affect how much credit is being consumed, so go for the best.
And now we’ve reached ‘Model’. This is a big one. It’s where you choose which generating algorithm you’d like to use. Up to this point, the available options and costs have been based on the ‘Veo 31’ engine which is selected by default. Click on that menu however, and you’ll find 13 others at your disposal. The official one is ‘Firefly Video’ and is the only one deemed to be ‘Commercially Safe’. The other models aren’t and have been created by third party partners.
It won’t be a surprise that credit cost and options vary wildly. Take ‘Firefly Video’: you now have a Square aspect ratio to your aspect ratio options, but the duration is locked at 5 seconds. It’s more expensive than ‘Veo 31’, at 500 credits for one video (ie, 100 credits a second, compared to half that for the default choice).
‘Veo 31 Fast’ preserves the options of ‘Veo 31’ for a vastly reduced cost: an 8 second video only costs 80 credits. I’m guessing the quality must suffer as a result.
I won’t bore you by going through every model, but I will finish this exploration by mentioning the most expensive model currently is ‘Ray3 HDR’ which produces clips up to 4K and costs 2,250 credits for a 5 second video.
Beneath all those ‘General Settings’ is ‘References’. Various models allow you to add an initial image for the AI to base its creation on. Some even let you add an end frame as well, and the algorithm will create everything in between.
So that’s pretty much it. Type in as descriptive a prompt as you can imagine, click on ‘Generate’ and spend those credits. Remember: whether you like the outcome or not, you can’t get those credits back, so prompt wisely.
Adobe Firefly: Edit Generated AI Video
Once Firefly has created a video for you, that’s not necessarily the end of the road: you actually have an option to ‘Edit’ the output.
You’re given two choices: either ‘Upscale’ your video, improving its quality and overall look, or access another ‘Prompt’, to make changes to what you’ve been given. Improving the quality cost me 80 credits and I was only given one model to choose from… so… not really a choice, then. It also took forever for the video to get made, so much longer in fact than the original one did, and to be frank, I didn’t see much difference.
Prompt however, allows you to go back to the source and try again, improving on the video based on additional information you can give the algorithm. I was offered three different rendering models, but I decided to spend my 250 credits on the default one.
Sadly, Prompt didn’t work for me. I tried it a few times, changing my input, simplifying it, deleting sections, but sadly it just wouldn’t play ball and kept giving me error messages. As far as I’m concerned, the Edit section was a bit of a disappointment considering the potential.
Adobe Firefly: Generate Video From Image
As a filmmaker and occasional YouTuber, I can see the potential of turning a still image into a video. Generating up to 8 seconds of motion could make for a much more interesting B-roll for instance, so I was keen to try this out.
I went back to the original menu, clicked on ‘Generate Video From Image’ and… it took me right back to the same interface we just explored with ‘Generate AI Video’. It’s kind of obvious when you think about it: the ‘References’ section I briefly discussed above is where you get to add one or more images for the algorithm to do its thing.
So, let’s get on with it.
I gave it a typical Welsh landscape photograph and asked Firefly to “see gentle wind blowing through the grass, as two bald eagles fly across the sky”. Not a sight we’d ever see in real life, but that’s the point of using AI, right? Firefly rendered me three eagles instead of two, which I was ok with.
However, what threw me was the fact the video panned across the image from left to right, depicting very accurately what was beyond the frame. It had no way of knowing what the coastline looked like as it wasn’t included in the photo. And yet, there is was, perfectly recreated, It’s enough to make you start believing in conspiracies, let me tell you: how did Firefly create the real actual landscape instead of making stuff up as I was expecting it to? How did it know?
Freakishly accurate AI landscape recreations aside, the process was exactly the same as the text-only prompt - with added uploaded images for inspiration: same interface, same general settings, same choice of models, resolution, and so on.
Adobe Firefly: Generate Animation
Using the same interface as before, generating an animation lets us animate a drawing. So, I went on Adobe Stock, found one, made some minor alterations to it, and used that as the starting frame, telling Firefly what I want to see: “the dog picks up the ball and runs away to the right, while the boy, sitting on the bench watches him go.”
And after a few minutes, and 400 more credits, I got what I asked for. I have to admit, this is the one that impressed me most. The dog came alive in a way I wasn’t expecting: he literally acted.
He grabbed the ball as requested, looked as his owner for a few seconds, then ran away, with ears flopping as he went. It was - almost - perfect. There were some glitches, especially with the phone the kid was holding, but overall, for such a simple prompt and starting image, it delivered above and beyond. Kudos to the programmers.
And at least it didn’t freak me out as much as the algorithm knowing what the coastline beyond what’s visible in a photo looks like! Not sure how I’m going to get over that clever trick.
Adobe Firefly: Final Thoughts
Adobe Firefly may have three different menus for three different types of AI-generated video, but whichever one you choose, you’ll end up in the same interface. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it makes it much easier to learn how everything works. The only difference is what you give the algorithm. I tried those three different types of generation, and each time was pleasantly surprised.
Perhaps the least impressive was text-only generation. Image-based and animation were both truly excellent - even if one had a handful of glitches and the other freaked me out by perfectly recreating the real coastline beyond the frame.
Anyone savvy with text-based prompting could likely end up with much better outcomes than I managed, but anyone with basic-to-rudimentary experience with AI can easily get the algorithm to create something more than acceptable for them. Your settings and options are clear and simple, with the only tricky part being selecting the generating model.
However, if that’s a little too overwhelming, the default option (Veo 31) produced excellent results in my opinion - just remember to set the resolution to 1080p, as it defaults to 720p and it won’t cost you any additional credits to bump up the resolution.
