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Credit: Hailuo MiniMax/Future AI
AI video generators are having a bit of a moment. Whether it’s Google’s Veo 3, complete with audio integration, or something like Kling 2 or Runway that are creating movie-quality clips with ease, the technology has come a long way.
But along with the big-name companies vying for the best AI video generator, there are some smaller underdogs of the AI video world. One that recently caught my eye was Hailouai.
I kept seeing videos generated by the model popping up on sites like X, with users showing off their impressive generations. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about Haliuo, in fact, we were impressed by a major update it revealed late last year.
But the AI company is back in people’s minds with its most recent updated called the Director model. In this version, like a few other big AI video generators, you can input camera angles and movements, to give your videos a bit more action.
Director Model
Credit: Hailuo AI / Alex Hughes
This new update gives users on Hailuo a bit more control over what they are producing. It allows for the alteration of camera angles in prompts in two ways. Users can either choose from a pre-selection of options like ‘downward tilt’ or ‘right walking’ or they can come up with their own.
Like most video generation experiences, creativity can either reward or hinder you. Sometimes, getting too complicated with camera angle suggestions resulted in a complete mess of an experience, or the model would ignore it completely.
I found more success when using Hailuo by focusing on the options I had been given.
You can choose to either make a video from scratch with a text prompt or use an existing image that you want to edit. You can also add an image of someone and ask for them to be dropped into a scene.
Credit: Hailou AI / Alex Hughes
This option comes with an incredibly long list of warnings about use of that image and follows the same concerns that come with deepfakes on any platform.
All of this technology can be found in competitors like Runway, Kling and Higgsfield. One of the major benefits of Haliuo is how good the free version of its software is.
The load times are slightly slower, and you are still limited in credits, but that limit is pretty high. You will be able to get 20 to 30 videos generated before you near the end of your credit limit and there are ways to get more without having to sign up for a paid plan.
However, on the free plan, your images and videos will have watermarks on them – something to keep in mind if you plan to use these videos commercially.
How to use Hailuo
Credit: Hailou AI / Alex Hughes
Once you’ve made an account on Hailuai, you’ll land on the homescreen. You should have roughly 1,000 credits at this point. Videos cost around 30 credits and images just 1.
On the left hand side there are four ways to interact with the AI generation. For this particular activity, we want the ‘create video’ section.
Here, you can choose to turn images into video, text to video or input your subject reference (an image of a person to edit).
Most importantly here, you want to change your model at the bottom to T2V-01-Director to add the camera angles change. Then, by clicking the small camera in the bottom right corner, you’ll be able to choose the camera angle style for your video.
Once that’s all selected, and you’ve put your prompt in, click the generate button in the bottom right.
It will take a few minutes to generate but compared to other free video generators is actually quite fast.
Bottom line
This isn’t the best AI video generator on the market, but considering how good its free plan is (and then how affordable the paid plans are) its a great choice for those not wanting to fork out large amounts of money to generate a few videos.
Hailuo offers all of the same features you’d see in leading models and, quite frankly, in some ways more. You can even ask Deepseek for assistance on your prompt directly from the Hailouai app.
With such stiff competition in this market, Hailoai is keeping up surprisingly well with the likes of OpenAI and Gemini, even offering the ability to add sound (at the expense of more credits of course).