Show HN: InstantVideos.org – short documentaries in ~30 seconds

A developer built InstantVideos.org, a system that generates short documentaries in about 30 seconds using AI models including GLM-5.2, Nano Banana 2 Lite, and gpt-4o-mini-tts, with costs around 25 cents per video. The project demonstrates the potential for on-demand AI video generation in narrow domains.

Hiya So I've been playing around with having Claude make videos for a bit now even had some success posting the results to TikTok and setup a whole pipeline so Claude can generate and post autonomously . With the release of Nano Banana 2 Lite, I was curious show fast I could make the generation, so last night I gave it a whirl and got down to around 30s for short-form video. It uses GLM-5.2 fast via Fireworks to generate the scripts and image prompts and, like I said, Nano Banana 2 Lite for the images, gpt-4o-mini-tts for the narration, and ffmpeg to string it all together and add the Ken Burns zoom effect which still has a shake I haven't been able to get rid of . The video compilation proved to be the blocker once the rest was in place, but I was able to speed that up by putting it on a 64 vCPU EC2. The cost might be the most interesting aspect as the short form videos tend to be about 25 cents. Almost 90% of that is the images, which are 3.336 cents a piece. Of course, running the big 64 core EC2 to allow for the creation isn't cheap. It seems like on-demand AI video is coming, and I thought this was an interesting demo of how close it might be in at least one narrow video domain. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812045 Points: 18 Comments: 18