Your best footage is already shot. Stop asking AI to invent it. Last week a sell
By Jaspinall · November 11, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Your best footage is already shot.
Stop asking AI to invent it.
Last week a seller in my cohort shared her screen. A Drive folder full of phone clips of her products. Some vertical, some horizontal, a few filmed while she was packing things away.
Her plan was to have AI generate a new ad from scratch.
I'd point it at the folder instead.
AI is good at the boring parts of editing. Picking the best few seconds of a clip. Cutting a 15 second vertical. Following a storyboard. Laying text on top. Doing it all again for the next color.
It's much worse at inventing your product. Generated footage drifts. Colors shift, textures change, and shoppers notice when the thing that shows up at their door looks different.
Real footage doesn't have that problem. It's already your product.
So the job changes. You stop prompting for a video and start briefing an editor.
This is the kind of brief I'd hand it:
"Use only the clips in this folder. Build a 15 second 9:16 cut. Show every color in the lineup. Give me two versions, one silent and one with text overlays."
No scene descriptions. No camera moves. The footage already did that work.
Her first cut wasn't perfect. Two similar products got mixed up, and one darker clip looked dull next to the bright ones. Both are easy fixes in the next prompt, because the raw material is real and you can see exactly what's off.
A few things I'd steal from that session.
Film the messy stuff too. A clip of you taking something apart can play in reverse and look like it's coming together.
Keep your horizontal clips. Throw them in and see what the cut does with them.
Ask for silent and text versions every time. Then test which one holds attention.
Watch the language of your input. Feed it a listing in another language and your overlays come back in that language.
Before you pay for another round of AI video, open your camera roll. The ad is probably sitting there already.
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