Tencent launches AI video creation tool

A new animation tool called Follow-Your-Click has appeared on Microsoft's open source website GitHub. The tool allows users to create short animated videos by clicking on parts of an image and converting them into a moving video.

The project is a collaboration between Tencent's Hunyuan Group, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and China's Tsinghua University.

Tencent plans to release the full source code for the tool in April, but a trial version is already available on GitHub.

Follow-Your-Click was created to solve the problems that other image-to-video conversion models on the market have, which tend to move the entire scene instead of focusing on specific objects in the image.

Other AI models require users to provide detailed descriptions of how and where they want the image to move.

“Our framework enables simpler yet more accurate user control and better generation performance than previous methods,” the researchers wrote in their arXiv post.

Creating videos from text has been a hot topic since OpenAI introduced Sora on February 15.

Tencent previously released an open-source video creation and editing tool called VideoCrafter2 in January, which can create videos from text. This is an updated version of VideoCrafter1, which was released in October 2023 but was limited to 2-second videos.

Tencent's Chinese rivals have also joined the race. Alibaba Group recently launched a portrait video creation tool called EMO that turns photos and audio prompts into singing and talking videos.

Around the same time, ByteDance released its text-to-video model MagicVideo-V2.