*How to Start Making AI Videos in 2026*

If you ever wondered how creators on YouTube are making some of their B-roll, well let me be the one to tell you that nowadays it's mostly done with AI video generators, and now anyone can create B-roll without having to actually shoot it. But to do this for your YouTube videos, you need to understand the correct workflows, and doing so will make your life incredibly easy. So I've teamed up with Adobe to show you a smarter way to create YouTube ready visuals, or just B-roll in general using Adobe Firefly, all while keeping your results high quality and your credit usage low. It's basically like having a YouTube video generator to help you fill in any missing gaps. So with that said, let's go ahead and jump right into it. Okay, so if you haven't already, head over to firefly.adobe.com, and now we're going to start generating our B-roll, and we're going to do this by starting off in the Firefly image model. Now think of this as creating a preview for your YouTube videos B-roll shots, and this is a super cost-effective way to generate your B-rolls, because you're actually going to get the frames first before actually generating those videos. So for example, let's start with a prompt, like a young designer editing a laptop with cinematic lighting. Now you'll see here I have a few prompt suggestions, and this is because I've got this prompt feature enabled right here. Now right now you can see that we're on Firefly image ultra, and this actually gives us a bunch of different options, like choosing our content type, like photo or art. We also have our visual intensity, composition, style, and effects. Now if you want the most realistic images to date, you want to actually go ahead and switch over to image 5. However, you will notice that you don't have all of these other options, and this is because this is the latest model that has just released, but through my testing it is also the most realistic looking image generator that Adobe provide. Now a quick mention inside the models, you do also have partner models. So here you've got Flux, you've got GPT, Ideogram, and Imagine by Google, as well as Nano Banana, which is really awesome. But we're purely going to be sticking on Firefly, because this is going to give us commercially safe content, so we can use it across the board without having to worry about any licensing issues. So we're going to go ahead and make sure our aspect ratio is correct for YouTube, which is 16 by 9. Now we're going to go ahead and hit on generate. Now to be honest, right off the bat, this one looks insane. You can see how realistic it looks, and I'm super happy with this. Now you can also go ahead and edit your image, and this is going to be using Google Nano Banana, which is really awesome at editing your images. So for example, if I wanted to change her jacket, change her jacket to red, and go ahead and hit on generate, you can see that it's perfectly changed just the jacket in this image, which is awesome. So here's the before, and here's the after. And again, if we want to do something funky, like give her sunglasses. I know she's inside, but you know how we edit, we're always looking at a screen, we need some sunglasses sometimes. And boom, looks perfect. But because we're doing this for a professional YouTube channel, we're going to stick with the original image, because I think this one looks absolutely amazing. And again, you can keep editing or reiterating as many images you want until you get the one that you're happy with. But once you are happy with your final image, we have an optional step, which I highly, highly, highly recommend. And that's by upscaling your images. And if you're not familiar with upscaling, it basically sharpens your image, but also keeps all the detail in your image. And here on screen, you can see a visual example of the before and the after. Now, this is extremely easy to do inside of your Adobe Suite. All you have to do is jump into Photoshop and make sure you're updated to the latest version. And all you have to do is use the new Generative Upscale feature and now it's at Adobe Max. So once your image is inside of Photoshop, just head over to Image, then Generative Upscale. Now here you'll see you've got a couple of options. You've got the Firefly Upscaler, but then you also have Topaz Gigapixel as well as Topaz Bloom. So you can select either of these options. Then you can select your scale. So scale it up by two times or four times. Here you can see that this is a huge resolution. So we're just going to stick to two times. Now we're going to go ahead and click on Upscale and boom, you're done. Now this is perfect if you want to add more realism to your AI generated images and makes this perfect for a clean first frame for your video. Just give you another before and after. Here you can see we've zoomed into the original image. And if we activate the upscaled one, boom, you can see how good that looks. And we can keep zooming in. This is what the before looks like. And this is the after. So you can see that there's incredible detail. You can just see all of these skin pores. And again, if we untick this, you can see that it's all pixelated in the original image. And then boom, it looks super crispy in the upscaled one. Now, before we move on inside of Adobe Firefly's AI Video Generator, if you're new to AI and want to actually learn how to use all the best tools to create content for yourself or your brand, or you just want to stay ahead of the curve, then be sure to check out my AI community down below. OK, so now we're going to go ahead and generate our first AI video. So we're going to head back to the Firefly homepage. We're going to go ahead and click on generate. Then we can scroll down a little bit over to video, or you can just click on generate video. But we actually want to select the image to video. Now, from here, we're going to go ahead and upload our upscaled first frame, which we can see right here, which looks great. And again, a quick overview of the video interface. Here you can see you've got all of your models as well as your settings. But again, because we're staying commercially safe, we're going to select the Firefly video. We're going to make sure that we select 1080p. And again, because this is for YouTube, 16 by 9. Then here you can see we've got FPS and our duration. Now, a really nice thing about using the Firefly video model is we actually get these camera motion presets. So we can go ahead and quickly click on any of these presets. For example, the zoom out. Then all we have to do is describe a quick prompt, and then we can go ahead and hit on generate. Now, because we have our image already, we don't actually have to describe the shot. We can just go ahead and describe what we want to happen. So we're going to put a camera slowly pans around the workspace. Now, the nice thing inside of Firefly is here you'll see you have enhanced prompt. So if you did want to go ahead and add a little bit more detail or you're using text to video, you can use this just to enhance your prompt. So for reference, this is what happens as soon as you click it. Boom, you can now see that we have a super detailed prompt. Now, we're actually going to do a quick test here because we have got the zoom out preset selected as well as this prompt. So we're going to go ahead and click on generate. Then we're also going to untick this and then we're going to click on generate again. Okay, so this is the video with the zoom out. So here we can see it zooming out and it's still panning around the subject, which looks really great. And now we have the one without the zoom out and this one is basically just panning around our subject, which is awesome. Now, I don't want you guys to ignore the traditional text to video because there's some huge advantages of using this one over image to video. So let me show you why. To access it, we're going to head back and then on generate, we're just going to click on video and this time text to video. Now, as you can see, we're no longer using the image to video. So you'll actually notice that we now have a bunch more features. So here you can see we now have composition. We also have camera as well as our traditional shots. But now we also have the shot size as well as the camera angle. And down below here, you can see that you've got the style. So if you wanted a cinematic style or a 3D style, you could select that here. And at the very bottom, which is super cool, is the transparent background. And you can use this to create effects like these or inside of Adobe Firefly, which is absolutely amazing because now you don't have to spend hours looking for specific effects. You can just prompt it and then Firefly will generate it for you. So first off, we're going to reverse engineer everything we spoke about before. So as you know, in the first method, we generated our image first, then our video. And as you know, using the image model, we already have a super great prompt and we know exactly what type of shot that's going to get us. So let's go ahead and copy that prompt. And we're going to use that inside of the image generator. But this time, what we're going to do is click on enhance prompt. And again, this is going to give us a way more detailed prompt, which we can see right here. So now we have to do is go ahead and expand our prompt and tell it exactly what we want to happen in our video. But the beauty of text to video is we now have all of these features. So let's go ahead and show them. So here we've got the composition. And you can use this to basically match the composition you want in your video. Then we've got our camera. So here you can actually go ahead and upload a reference video and it's going to match the exact same camera motion, which is really awesome. But if you scroll down, you can see we still have our motion presets here, but we now have access to shot size, which is awesome. So let's go ahead and select medium shot. Then you can also go ahead and select your camera angle. So this time, let's go with a high angle shot. We're going to skip the motion presets for now, because here you can see we also have the style. So if you want to change it to something like 3D, cinematic, fantasy or stop motion, you can go ahead and click on these presets and it's going to apply those effects to your video. So we can go ahead and try out 3D. And again, all of these controls give you creative direction, very similar to how a cinematographer would frame a shot. But now you can tailor it exactly how you want it to look for your YouTube videos. Now, once you've decided how you want your video to look, you can go ahead and hit on generate and check this out. Doesn't that just look great? And again, I'll remind you that this is a 3D style, but let's go ahead and choose cinematic, hit on generate and boom. Now the beauty of using the Firefly video model is everything you create is commercially safe, meaning you can use this for all of your commercial work without having to worry about if it's safe to use. Now to finish off, I want to introduce you to three really cool features inside of Adobe Firefly. We've got generate soundtrack, generate sound effects and generate speech. Now generate soundtrack is pretty straightforward and it's super fun to use. You can go ahead and upload a video and then it's going to suggest some prompts for you to start making your audio or you can just go ahead and select all of these options. So go ahead and clear the prompt. We need to describe a vibe, describe a style and describe a purpose. So let's say that we want a upbeat song. This time we're going to go with synth wave because I like that. And then we're going to go with tutorial style because this is a tutorial. I like the energy high, the tempo high, everything high. And then let's go with, I don't know, two minutes. Go ahead and click on generate and just have a listen to this. That little drop, that's nice. And as you can see, you've got four different tracks to pick from. I like it. That's awesome. Okay, let's move on to generate sound effects. Okay, now again, this is super straightforward as well. You have two options this time though. This time you can go ahead and describe what you want. So let's do a lion roar and then we can set our duration to, I don't know, four seconds and go ahead and click on generate. And again, we're getting four different variations here. That one sounds awesome. Perfect. Oof, that one sounds hungry. But yeah, that's super awesome. But then the second method is probably my favourite because you can actually go ahead and record your own audio and then it's going to create the sound effects with your audio waves, which is really awesome. A cinematic whoosh. Three, two, one. Hit generate and let's check these out. It's so cool. It's actually crazy that you can go ahead and create your own sound effects inside of Firefly. Now to finish off, we're going to do generate speech. Now, instead of me explaining what this is, we're going to let Brittany explain it for you. So we're going to type in our prompt, hit generate and let Brittany take over. So generate speech allows you to create voiceovers for whatever you want. All you have to do is type in what you want, select the voice and speed and pitch, then hit generate. Thanks, Brittany. That was super useful. How about you film the rest of my videos for me? No, you're doing great, Seb. You go, girl. All right. Now, once you have all your b-roll and everything you need for your YouTube videos, you can just go ahead and edit everything together. And again, if you didn't know, Firefly actually now has a video editor and all of your assets that you generate are going to be all inside one place, which is super awesome. So that's how you can make video b-rolls in Adobe Firefly without having to actually film anything. It's like having a YouTube video generator to help you fill in any missing gaps and you can finally feel confident that the content you create with Firefly is commercially safe to use. Now, if you found this video helpful, then be sure to like and subscribe for more awesome AI updates just like this. And again, if you want to learn how to master all the best AI tools, then be sure to check out my AI community down below. I'll see you in the next one.