Recently I needed to generate a bunch of short videos for a project I’m working on.  I’m working on a YouTube series for LowEndBoxTV and some parts of the video are more talking than showing.  I’m using some stock footage, but I thought, why not see what AI can do.

There’s OpenAI’s Sora, which does produce very nice videos.  There’s also Leonardo, which offers various models, but it’s relatively expensive.  But then I saw Adobe Firefly was having a promo.  Sign up and you get unlimited generations through March 18.  Woot!

So I signed up, spent my $29.99, and…OMG.

First, the unlimited free generations come with some serious limitations.  You can only use Adobe’s engine, Firefly, and not any of their partner videos, but this is Adobe, so their flagship model must be pretty premium, right?  Only 1080 and 8 seconds, but I can live with that.

What I can’t live with are the horrible videos.  The couple dozen videos I’ve generated have all suffered from

• mutated fingers and hands
• jerky faces
• weird shadows
• bizarre artifacts
• and just forget about any kind of word sync

Some of these exact prompts work perfectly in Leonardo video gen, Sora, etc.

It’s like using Midjourney in 2023.  Remember that era?  Where you avoided hands and feet because they were always wrong and you’d generate 8 images just to hope to have 1 that wasn’t completely psycho.  That’s what Adobe Firefly is like.

And Adobe is pricing it like this is a premium product!

Check out these fine gens:

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.