u/dettol99perc

I run a small med spa and have been trying to post more video content on Instagram and TikTok to get more customers but I’m a bit stuck. I have zero budget for a videographer and honestly no time nor desire to film myself as I’m not competent with the camera.

I've seen other businesses in my area posting really nice looking videos and I can't figure out how they're exactly doing it and what they’re process is. Someone mentioned some video tools to me last week but I have no idea where to start. There seem to be a lot of options out there.

Can anyone recommend something to start with? Am I overcomplicating this and should just hire a videographer or an agency?

I taught myself HTML when I was 14. Built my first website on Geocities and ran WordPress sites for years after college. I'm not afraid of tech.

Last month I decided I should start posting on LinkedIn for my consulting practice. People keep telling me I need to be on video. Fine.

I talked with 6 different people and each one told me to use something different. “oh it’s easy, just use CapCut for editing, ElevenLabs for voiceover backup, Claude for scripts, Argil for ai video generation, Buffer for scheduling” bla bla bla. Sigh…

I have a video idea on a Tuesday, and by Saturday I've half-learned 4 of these tools and there's a 47 second clip sitting in some draft folder. Meanwhile my 19 year old niece is posting 5 things a day from her phone with what looks like just her camera app and zerostress.

Asked her what she uses. "bunch of stuff." That was her answer. Stuff.

Is there a sane way for someone my age to do this without it becoming a part time job? What do people use day to day to produce 2-3 videos a week and stay consistent on social media, ideally without 8 tabs open and a meltdown by Sunday?

I run a short-form content agency for personal brands on Linkedin and I'm looking to add an ai video generator to my 2026 stack. I need something that turns scripts into short videos with captions and exports things fast.

I mainly work with busy founders and C-suite executives and I need something that can generate talking heads and realistic avatars so I can onboard more clients and scale my agency. So far I have looked at argil and heygen but i’m not sure yet. Anyone have a good recommendation for me?

I feel like i've been gaslit by the marketing because every tool i've tested calls itself an "ai video editor" but when i open it, it's a timeline with a cursor. and i still have to drag clips, pick where the captions go, choose the b-roll, decide the cuts.

The only "ai" part is autocaptioning and maybe a magic-cut feature that removes silences.

What I actually need right now for my work is to paste a script, get back a finished video. no timeline, no nothing, and definitely not a static avatar reading the script either, that's something else entirely.

I saw some people here mention Argil and Heygen among others but I am yet to test any.

is the real category just "ai video generators" and "ai video editors" is mostly marketing?

I run a supplement brand in europe and I'm hitting a wall with creative production. I’m doing about 36k a month mostly from tiktok ads and our review-style creatives work really well but they burn out pretty fast, need like 30 fresh variations every week just to keep performance stable.

The problem is we're spending around 4 to 5k per month on ugc creators and the turnaround is not ideal for us to scale. Sometimes it takes a week to get one video back and quality is not consistent. I looked at some ai avatars to speed things up but honestly everything i test looks immediately fake.

What I'm trying to figure out is if anyone here has actually gotten this to work at big volume? like can you pump out 60+ review videos per week with ai without customers immediately sensing something's off?

I am thinking about going hybrid where we use ai to test a bunch of different angles fast at low spend then remake the winners with real creators for scale. I saw some people here mention argil and heygen but i can't tell if they're actually good for tiktok native content or just for boring explainer videos.

Do you think this is dumb and should just keep hiring creators?

I have been seeing a lot of confusion in this sub about what these tools actually do so i figured I'd break it down from someone who uses both categories daily in my job.

I will start with text-to-video tools. Many exist in the market such as Kling, Sora, Runway, Veo… These tools generate video from a prompt or image. What you usually do is describe a scene and the model renders it. The output is generative, meaning it creates something that didn't exist. These tools are great for cinematic content, b-roll, or creative storytelling.

On the other hand, we have avatar tools like Argil, HeyGen, Synthesia which work completely differently. You train the model on a real person's likeness and that person then delivers any script you feed it. Same face every time, consistent identity, no prompting for visuals. They’re great for personal brand content, educational videos, corporate communications, UGC ads…

The confusion usually happens because both categories output video, but the use cases are almost entirely separate.

If you want to build a YouTube channel with a consistent host, a real estate agent who wants to post daily without filming every day, or a course creator who wants to scale their educational content, here avatar tools are the right category because text-to-video won't give you a consistent face. However, if you want cinematic b-roll, creative short films, or generative visual content, then text-to-video is the right category.

I hope this clears it up. happy to answer questions on either category.