I Tried Midjourney's AI Video Generator, and It's Hard to Beat the Value for the Price

CNET

5 days ago

Midjourney has come a long way. As one of the original AI image generators, the popular service is no longer Discord-exclusive. It's expanded its offers with new features and models, including its most recent seventh-generation image model. Now, Midjourney has joined the pool of AI companies that support AI video generation.
As CNET's resident AI creative software reviewer, I knew I had to try out its V1 video model. I was most curious to see if the creative, detailed quality I had come to enjoy in its AI images would translate to its new videos. What I found was classic Midjourney: fun results, with some common AI foibles, wrapped in an intuitive, quick-to-use interface.
Midjourney is a competitive option for AI enthusiasts in an increasingly crowded market. But before you pull out your wallet, you should know where the cracks and pitfalls are. Here's how my experience with Midjourney went, including the video fails and successes that I generated.
The good, bad and physics-defying nature of Midjourney videos
Midjourney offers image-to-video generation. You can upload your own images and animate them, with or without additional text prompting. This is great for constraining the model to one image's appearance -- reducing the chance for it to run wild and hallucinate -- but I hope the company eventually adds a text-to-video pathway for those of us who prefer to ideate with text rather than imagery.
To test and stretch Midjourney's artistic capabilities, I generated AI images first. Then, I asked it to animate them with instructions for specific movements or additional elements moving through the frame. The results, like any AI creative service, were hit or miss.
First, the things I liked: Midjourney's videos were easy to create, simple to upscale and came in its usual colorful and whimsical style. It was a speedy process, usually about a minute or two for a batch of four variations per prompt. You can adjust several settings, including dimensions, before running your prompt. My favorite tool was a new-to-me slider that let me increase the weirdness of a video. The videos are capped at five seconds, with no watermarks and no audio.
Now, the bad. Midjourney still struggles with prompt adherence, or creating exactly what you ask for. This is something I've run into with its image generator, too. For example, in one video, I asked it to make some tree roots move and add some fairies floating above them. I only got the new elements, while my tree roots stayed static. Text generation is still messy and illegible. (To be fair to Midjourney, OpenAI's new image generator has set a pretty high bar.) My dreams of having a butterfly reveal the phrase "I'm over it" didn't quite come true.
Object permanence is also a struggle. Sometimes the model understands and obeys the laws of physics, and other times overlapping elements disappear and reappear at random. It took a lot of generating to get an example of Michael Jordan dunking over LeBron James without his hand going through the solid hoop or the ball disintegrating the net. And yes, I was able to generate semi-recognizable versions of celebrities, with and without using their names in my prompts. The AI moderator only kicked in occasionally.
You can try to add objects after your image is created, but it was pretty inexact and frustrating in my experience. I got the best results when I crafted my perfect image (or grabbed a favorite from my camera roll) and simply told Midjourney to animate it -- basically, just make things move with simple stage directions. I know adding too many moving parts to a project is usually a disaster, but I expect better when that project is creating a video.
How Midjourney stacks up against Veo 3 and competitors
The best AI video service for you is going to depend on your project and the quality level you need to complete it. Amateur creators and Midjourney enthusiasts will find familiar ground and a lot to enjoy, but many AI quirks mean Midjourney will run too short to be useful for professional creators.
One obvious place where Midjourney's video falls short of its competitors is with audio. If you need AI-generated and/or synchronized audio to go with your AI video clips, you'll need to use Veo 3 or Adobe Firefly. Midjourney's V1 doesn't have that capability, though it's possible that could change with a future update.
Other things to consider when choosing between Midjourney and other services are whether you already have assets you want to animate or want to brainstorm/start from scratch. Midjourney excels as an AI brainstorming partner, and its creativity helped spark new ideas. The model could easily animate my existing images, but more complex instructions often made it harder to bring my exact ideas to life. In those cases, patience -- and plenty of time refining and editing prompts -- will be your best friends.
Midjourney pricing, availability and privacy
Midjourney is a paid-only service available through its website and Discord. Its subscriptions start at $10 per month -- cheaper than Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora, which both start at $20 per month. (Adobe Firefly also starts at $10 per month.) Upgrading to pricier plans gets you more concurrent jobs and faster generation time, which means you can run multiple prompts at once, and those jobs will be ready quicker.
Midjourney's privacy policy says it can use the information you provide to train its machine learning algorithms. It also says the company may share your information with service providers, third-party vendors and other business partners. All your images and videos are automatically shared in Midjourney's public gallery unless you pony up for the stealth mode feature in the $60 per month Pro plan or the most expensive Mega plan for $120 per month.
Also noteworthy in privacy considerations, Midjourney recently got slapped with a massive copyright infringement lawsuit. Disney and Universal called the AI service "a bottomless pit of plagiarism" in its complaint alleging that Midjourney allowed its users to create ultra-realistic images of protected characters like Shrek and Yoda. The case is ongoing and doesn't currently impact Midjourney users.
For more, check out how to write the best AI image prompts and how to fix the most common AI hallucinations.