Grok Imagine Video

Turn images into cinematic videos with synchronized audio using xAI’s Video model.

Grok Imagine Video takes a static image and brings it to life with realistic motion, object interactions, and automatically generated sound. Upload a portrait, a product photo, or any illustration, and watch it transform into a video complete with background music, sound effects, and ambient audio that matches the visual content.

What it does

This model animates still images into short videos with synchronized audio. It handles both the visual generation and audio synthesis in one pass, so you get videos with sound that actually fits what’s happening on screen, no separate audio editing needed.

The model understands different types of content and adapts accordingly. It can animate cartoon characters with exaggerated expressions, turn product photos into 360-degree showcases, or add natural motion to portraits while maintaining the original style and composition of your image.

How it works

Grok Imagine Video uses xAI’s Aurora model, an autoregressive mixture-of-experts architecture trained on billions of examples from the internet. The model predicts image tokens sequentially, which gives tight control over generation and helps maintain visual consistency across frames.

The audio generation happens natively alongside the video creation. Rather than adding sound in post-production, the model generates background music, sound effects, and ambient audio that’s synchronized with the visual content from the start. For animations with characters, it can even handle lip-sync for dialogue and singing.

The model processes images through multiple specialized networks that work together to optimize different aspects of video generation—one handles motion physics, another manages temporal consistency to prevent flickering or artifacts, and others focus on style preservation and audio-visual coherence.

What you can make

Product showcases: Transform static product photography into dynamic demonstrations. A watch photo becomes a luxury ad with an elegant wrist turn. A sneaker shot gets a 360-degree rotation with dramatic lighting.

Character animation: Turn illustrated characters into smooth animations. The model understands cartoon physics and exaggerated motion, creating professional-quality animation that would typically require an entire animation team.

Portrait videos: Animate professional headshots into video introductions with natural human motion. The model handles realistic facial expressions, head turns, and body language.

Creative projects: Bring concept art to life, animate historical photos, or turn memes into short video clips with appropriate sound effects and music.

Generation modes

The model offers different creative modes that affect how it interprets your prompt:

Normal mode produces balanced, professional results with realistic motion and consistent quality. This works well for most use cases where you want reliable, high-quality output.

Fun mode adds more dynamic and creative elements to the generation. The results are more playful and whimsical, with exaggerated motion and stylized interpretations.

Custom mode gives you more precise control over specific aspects of the generation when you need fine-tuned adjustments.

Tips for better results

Be specific in your prompts about the type of motion you want. Instead of just “animate this,” try “person turns head and smiles” or “camera slowly zooms in while object rotates clockwise.”

The model works best with clear, well-composed images. Higher quality input images generally produce better results, especially for details like facial features or product textures.

For product shots, describe the exact camera movement and lighting changes you want. For character animation, specify the expressions and gestures. For portraits, mention the type of motion—subtle head turns work better than complex full-body movements in a 6-second clip.

The audio generation responds to your prompt too. If you want specific types of sound, mention them: “with upbeat electronic music” or “ambient forest sounds” or “dramatic orchestral score.”

Technical details

• Video duration: 1-15 seconds
• Audio: Automatically generated and synchronized with video
• Architecture: Autoregressive mixture-of-experts (Aurora model)
• Capabilities: Image-to-video with native audio-video synthesis

The model generates four unique video variations simultaneously, so you can test different creative interpretations quickly and pick the one that works best for your project.

Try it yourself

You can run this model and experiment with different images and prompts on the Replicate Playground at replicate.com/playground