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Text to Video AI: Text to Video Generator and AI Video Generator From Text for Product Ads

The phrase hides two different products, and the difference is what your text actually is. In one, the text describes a picture the model invents. In the other, the text is what a person says about the product you really sell. This page separates them, prices both, and gives you the script length math. Or skip ahead: paste a product URL on the right.

Prices verified August 2026 Script length to runtime table Where scene models beat us, stated

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The short answer Last updated August 2026

Text to video AI turns written input into video without a camera, but two separate product categories sell under that name and the difference is what the word "text" means in each. In a prompt to scene model such as Runway, Google Veo, Kling, Pika or Luma, your text is a description of the picture, and the model invents every pixel of a 5 to 20 second clip. Your actual product is not in it, because the model has never seen it. In a script to presenter tool such as UGCGen, HeyGen, Synthesia or Creatify, your text is dialogue, and the output is a person saying those words over your real product footage, at whatever length the script runs. Ad buyers almost always want the second one and get shown the first, because the first is what ranks for the phrase. The test takes one question: if your text is a description of a scene you imagined, you want a scene model. If your text is what someone should say about something you sell, you want a script tool, and the invented scene is a dead end no matter how good it looks.

2.5

Words per second of read

5 to 20s

Scene model clip ceiling

1080x1920

Reels, TikTok, Shorts

$49

UGCGen, per month flat

Read this first

Prompt to scene or script to presenter: the two things people mean by text to video

Every roundup for this phrase lists both kinds in one table, ranked by video quality, as though they were competing. They are not. They take different text and return different files. Sorting yourself into the right row first saves more money than picking the right brand inside the wrong row.

	Prompt to scene	Script to presenter
The text you type is	A description of the picture	The words someone says
Who writes it best	Someone who thinks in shots	Someone who thinks in hooks
Is your real product in it	No, the model invents a lookalike	Yes, from your photo or product URL
Is there a person speaking	Only a silent invented figure	Yes, a presenter you choose
Sound	None, you add it later	Voiceover and captions included
Length of one generation	5 to 20 seconds	As long as the script runs
Consistency across variants	Poor, every render re-rolls	High, same presenter and product
Priced by	Credits per second of output	Minutes or finished videos per month
Examples	Runway, Google Veo, Kling, Pika, Luma	UGCGen, HeyGen, Synthesia, Creatify
Right deliverable	Imagined b-roll, concept, mood, loop	An ad you can put spend behind

The row that catches people out is consistency. A scene model re-rolls the whole world on every generation, so ten variants of the same concept come back with ten different rooms, ten different lighting setups and ten different actors. Creative testing depends on changing one variable at a time, which that category structurally cannot do. If you are starting from a photograph instead of a sentence, the sibling page on the AI image to video generator covers that route, and the AI UGC pricing pillar explains what every meter in this market really counts.

The number nobody publishes

How many words your script needs for the runtime you want

Once your text is a script rather than a description, length stops being a creative choice and becomes arithmetic. A natural ad read runs at roughly 2.5 words per second, or 150 words a minute. Write past the count and the voice either speeds up or the video overruns the placement.

Runtime	Script words	What fits in it	Best placement
6 seconds	15 words	One hook, one product name	YouTube bumper, pre-roll
15 seconds	35 to 40 words	Hook, one benefit, call to action	Reels, TikTok, Shorts
20 seconds	about 50 words	Hook, problem, benefit, call to action	Reels, TikTok, Stories
30 seconds	70 to 75 words	Hook, problem, two benefits, proof, CTA	The default ad length everywhere
45 seconds	about 110 words	Adds a demo beat or an objection	TikTok, YouTube in-stream
60 seconds	about 150 words	Full story arc with social proof	YouTube, Meta cold audiences
90 seconds	about 225 words	Long form testimonial or explainer	Landing page, retargeting

Two adjustments to the arithmetic. Add roughly a second wherever you want a pause for a product shot, because the table assumes continuous speech. And spend a disproportionate share of the word budget on the opening: in a 30 second ad the first 2 seconds decide whether the other 28 are watched, which in practice means the first 5 words carry more weight than the following 70. If you would rather not write the script at all, the UGC ad script generator drafts hooks to these lengths from a product URL.

Real prices, checked this month

What text to video AI actually costs in 2026

The two categories do not even meter the same unit, which is why price comparison across them is usually meaningless. Scene models sell credits that buy seconds of generated footage. Script tools sell minutes of finished video or a number of finished ads.

Tool	Category	Entry paid plan	What that buys
Runway	Prompt to scene	$15/mo, $12 billed annually	625 credits, roughly 25 seconds of flagship generation
Runway Pro	Prompt to scene	$35/mo, $28 billed annually	2,250 credits, roughly 90 seconds of flagship generation
Synthesia Starter	Script to presenter	$29/mo, $18 billed annually	10 minutes of video a month
Synthesia Creator	Script to presenter	$89/mo, $64 billed annually	30 minutes of video or AI dubbing a month
HeyGen Creator	Script to presenter	$29/mo, $24 billed annually	600 credits a month
Creatify	Ad-native script tool	$39/mo	Credit pool aimed at short ad variants
Arcads	Ad-native script tool	$110/mo	Volume plan built for creative testing
UGCGen Starter	Ad-native script tool	$49/mo	Finished ads with presenter, voice and captions

Runway and Synthesia figures were read off their own pricing pages in August 2026. HeyGen, Creatify and Arcads figures come from our earlier checks of their published pages and move less often, but verify before you buy, because this market reprices frequently. Google Veo is deliberately absent from the price column because it is bundled into Google AI subscription tiers rather than sold as a standalone per clip rate, so any per video number quoted for it elsewhere is someone else's arithmetic rather than a published price. OpenAI's Sora is absent for a different reason: OpenAI announced in March 2026 that it was discontinuing Sora, the app and web experience shut down in April 2026, and the API is scheduled to end on 24 September 2026. Roundups still recommending it as a 2026 option have not been updated. Tool by tool detail lives on the HeyGen pricing breakdown and the Creatify pricing breakdown.

Pick in one question

Which category your job belongs in

You are selling a specific product

Script to presenter, every time. The buyer needs to see the item they will receive, and a scene model cannot show it because it has never seen it. Feed the tool your product URL so the listing photography, price and review language all reach the script.

You need imagined footage

Prompt to scene. Abstract openers, mood pieces, impossible camera moves, a city that does not exist. There is no product to be faithful to, so invention is the point rather than the problem.

You are testing ten hooks

Script to presenter. Testing needs one variable to change while everything else holds still, and a scene model re-rolls the entire world on each render, so nothing is comparable.

You need one gorgeous 8 second shot

Prompt to scene. This is exactly what the category is built for, and paying a monthly subscription for hook writing you will not use makes no sense.

You need 30 or 60 seconds

Script to presenter. Scene models drift past roughly 10 seconds and cap a single generation well short of a full ad, so the alternative is stitching clips by hand.

You are running the ad this week

Script to presenter, or an ad-native tool specifically. The generated footage is maybe a tenth of a finished ad. The hook, voice, captions, aspect ratios and variants are the rest, and assembling those by hand is where the week goes.

Plenty of teams end up running both, and that is a reasonable outcome rather than a failure to decide. The usual shape is a script tool producing the ads that carry spend, and a scene model producing occasional b-roll that gets cut into the strongest performers. What does not work is buying a scene model expecting it to replace an ad workflow, which is the single most common expensive mistake in this category. If you are weighing named tools against each other, the best AI UGC ad generator roundup ranks the ad-native ones, and the Synthesia alternative comparison covers the corporate presenter tools in detail.

Where a scene model beats us

What we genuinely cannot do

We build the script to presenter kind of tool, so the boundary is worth stating plainly rather than burying. On raw visual invention, a frontier scene model is far ahead of anything an ad generator produces, and it is not close. If your brief is a snow leopard walking through a neon flooded warehouse, or a liquid morphing into your logo, or a drone shot through a canyon that does not exist, we cannot make that and Runway, Google Veo or Kling can. The whole point of that category is that nothing constrains it to reality, and for concept work, title sequences, mood films and pitch visuals, that freedom is exactly the feature.

Scene models also win on directorial control of the image itself. You can iterate a prompt until the light falls the way you pictured, specify lens language, and re-roll until the composition is right, because there is no presenter, no script timing and no caption layer imposing structure. An ad generator deliberately removes those degrees of freedom in exchange for producing something complete, and if what you want is control rather than completeness, the trade goes the other way.

The line between the categories is not quality, it is whether the video has to be true. The moment the video has to show a real product a real customer will receive, invention becomes a liability rather than a feature, and every strength listed above turns into a reason the footage is unusable. That is the honest boundary, and it is why both categories will keep existing rather than one absorbing the other.

Text to video AI FAQ

What is text to video AI?

Text to video AI is any model that takes written input and returns a video without a camera. The phrase covers two different products. In prompt to scene tools the text describes what the picture should look like and the model invents the footage. In script to presenter tools the text is dialogue, and the model renders a person saying it over your own product footage. Both are called text to video, and they produce very different files.

Can AI generate a video from text?

Yes. Current models generate video from a written prompt in roughly 30 seconds to 3 minutes of render time. Prompt to scene models such as Runway, Google Veo, Kling and Luma produce clips of about 5 to 20 seconds. Script to presenter tools produce full length ads because they are assembling a performance rather than predicting every frame, so a 30 or 60 second video is routine there and unusual in the other category.

What is the best text to video AI?

It depends entirely on whether your text is a description or a script. If you are describing an imagined scene and want maximum visual quality, Runway, Google Veo, Kling and Luma lead on raw footage. If your text is what someone should say about a real product you sell, a script to presenter tool such as UGCGen, HeyGen, Synthesia or Creatify is the right category, because the invented scene will never contain your actual product.

How long can AI generated videos be?

Prompt to scene models typically cap a single generation at 5 to 20 seconds, and quality drifts noticeably past about 10 seconds because the model loses track of what it drew earlier. Script to presenter tools have no equivalent limit: the video runs as long as the script does, so 30, 60 and 90 second ads are normal. If you need a 30 second video from a scene model you are stitching several clips together.

How long does AI video generation take?

Most tools return a short clip in about 30 seconds to 3 minutes. Render time scales with resolution, duration and how much motion is in the scene, so a 1080p clip with fast camera movement and several moving subjects takes noticeably longer than a slow push in. Queue time on free tiers is often longer than the render itself, which is why paid tiers advertise priority generation.

How many words is a 30 second video script?

About 70 to 75 words. Natural ad read pace is roughly 2.5 words per second, or 150 words per minute. That gives 35 to 40 words for a 15 second ad, about 50 for 20 seconds, 70 to 75 for 30 seconds and around 150 for a full minute. Write to the word count rather than trimming afterwards, because scripts written long get read fast, and a rushed voiceover reliably underperforms.

Can text to video AI show my actual product?

Not if you are using a prompt to scene model. Those models invent every pixel from a text description, so they generate something that resembles your product category rather than your product. To get your real item on screen you need a tool that accepts your product photo or product URL and composites it into the video, which is how script to presenter and ad-native generators work.

How much does text to video AI cost?

Prompt to scene models are metered in credits: Runway lists Standard at $15 a month for 625 credits and Pro at $35 for 2,250, where a second of flagship generation costs about 25 credits. Script to presenter tools sell time or finished videos instead: Synthesia lists Starter at $29 a month for 10 minutes and Creator at $89 for 30 minutes, and UGCGen starts at $49 a month counted in finished ads.

Is there a free text to video AI?

Several tools have free tiers, but almost all of them watermark the export, and a watermarked file cannot legally or practically be run as a paid ad. Synthesia lists 10 free minutes a month on its Basic plan and Runway gives 125 one time credits. Treat free tiers as a way to judge output quality before you buy, not as a production route, and check the commercial use terms on whichever plan you land on.

How do I turn a script into a video with AI?

Paste the script into a script to presenter tool, choose the voice and the on screen presenter, attach your product footage or product URL so the item appears in frame, pick the aspect ratio, then render. The two steps people skip are trimming the script to the word count the runtime allows, and burning captions in rather than relying on platform auto-captions, which are unreliable and often mistime.

Do I have to disclose AI generated video in ads?

On the major social platforms, yes, when the video shows a realistic person or event that was generated. Meta and TikTok both require realistic AI generated content to be labeled, and both apply automated detection in addition to the disclosure you provide. Labeling is not a ranking penalty. Failing to label and being detected is the outcome that costs you distribution, so declare it at upload.

Why do my AI videos look different every time I generate one?

Because prompt to scene models sample a new result from the same description on every run, so the room, the lighting and the person all change. There is no setting that fully fixes this, which is why the category struggles with ad variants. If you need ten videos that differ in exactly one respect, generate them from a tool that holds the presenter and the product constant and changes only the script.

Turn your script into an ad you can run

Paste a product URL or your own script, pick a creator, and get a UGC-style ad with a voiceover and burned-in captions in 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9. Free to start with your account, no credit card needed.

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