Tencent‘s Hunyuan Video-Foley AI Brings Lifelike Audio to Generated Videos
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A team at Tencent’s Hunyuan lab has unveiled a groundbreaking AI, dubbed ‘hunyuan Video-Foley,’ poised to revolutionize the creation of synthetic media. The new system generates high-quality, perfectly synchronized audio for videos, addressing a long-standing challenge in the field of AI-driven content creation.
Ever watched an AI-generated video and felt something was missing? While the visuals may be impressive,the often-present silence can detract from the immersive experience. In professional filmmaking, the art of creating realistic sound effects – from rustling leaves to clinking glasses – is known as Foley art, a meticulous and highly skilled craft.Replicating this level of detail has proven tough for AI. Existing models often struggle to understand the nuances of a scene, leading to generic or mismatched audio. Such as, if prompted to generate the sound of birds, but instructed to generate “the sound of ocean waves,” the AI would likely deliver only waves, completely ignoring the footsteps and bird calls that contribute to a realistic soundscape.Furthermore, the quality of existing AI-generated audio was often lacking, compounded by a scarcity of high-quality, labeled video and audio data for training purposes.
Tencent’s Three-pronged Approach
Tencent’s Hunyuan team tackled these obstacles through a multi-faceted strategy. First, they recognized the need for a more complete educational dataset for the AI. This led to the creation of a massive libary containing 100,000 hours of video, audio, and corresponding text descriptions. To ensure quality, an automated pipeline was developed to filter out low-quality content – clips with prolonged silence or compressed, distorted audio – guaranteeing the AI learned from the best available material.
Second,the team engineered a more elegant AI architecture. This new design allows the model to effectively “multitask,” prioritizing the precise synchronization of visual and audio elements – matching a footstep to the exact moment a shoe strikes the ground, for instance. Once this timing is established, the system incorporates the text prompt to understand the overall context and mood of the scene, ensuring crucial details aren’t overlooked.
to guarantee high-fidelity audio output, the researchers implemented a training strategy called Depiction Alignment (REPA). This technique functions like having an experienced audio engineer oversee the AI’s training process, comparing its output to features from a pre-trained, professional-grade audio model to guide it toward producing cleaner, richer, and more stable sound.
open-Source Release and Promising Results
Today, Tencent announced the open-source release of HunyuanVideo-Foley, an end-to-end Text-Video-to-Audio (TV2A) framework designed for generating high-fidelity audio. 🚀 This tool is intended to empower creators in video production, filmmaking, and game development to produce professional-grade content.
https://twitter.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1693449999999999999
Testing revealed important improvements in performance when compared to other leading AI models. According to a company release, the results weren’t just statistically better; human listeners consistently rated Hunyuan Video-Foley’s output as higher quality, better aligned with the video content, and more accurately timed. Across multiple evaluation datasets, the AI demonstrated improvements in both the content and timing of the generated sound.
Tencent’s innovation represents a significant step toward bridging the gap between silent AI videos and truly immersive viewing experiences. By bringing the artistry of Foley sound design to the realm of automated content creation, Hunyuan Video-Foley offers a powerful new capability for filmmakers, animators, and creators across a wide range of industries.
See also: Google Vids gets AI avatars and image-to-video tools
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