Can I use phone-recorded footage as input for AI video generation?

Yes — phone-recorded footage works as an input for AI video generation, specifically as a camera-motion reference. Record the move on your phone, upload the clip to the invideo agent, and it extracts the motion and applies it to a completely different AI-generated scene via Seedance 2.0. In one documented test, a single phone clip replaced 50+ prompt-only generations.

Record the camera move you want with your phone, then let the AI apply that exact motion to a generated scene — no gimbal, drone, or cinema rig required. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current models available, and its agent reads your uploaded clip as a motion driver rather than as final content.

The workflow runs in four steps:

1. Record — frame your phone the way you want the shot framed, hit record, and physically execute the move: a dolly-in, a simple pan, a push-in-and-swirl. Any move you can perform with a phone transfers — three distinct move types have been demonstrated converting cleanly, including a dolly-in filmed on a toy figure on a table that transferred to a cinematic shot of a rider in a desert.

2. Upload — drop the clip into the invideo agent. The uploaded video acts as the driver for the camera move; the footage itself is discarded and never appears in the output.

3. Prompt — describe the scene you actually want generated, in your film's aspect ratio.

4. Render — the invideo agent routes the motion data to Seedance 2.0, which generates the new scene with your camera move applied.

One optimization matters more than anything else: match your phone recording's framing to the first frame of your target generated video. The closer the alignment, the better the motion transfer — skipping this step measurably degrades the output.

The economics favor the phone clip heavily. Getting one specific compound camera move through prompting alone took 50+ generations, hundreds of credits, and over an hour of referencing and re-referencing — a single phone-recorded reference delivered the same move in one pass. The same logic applies against 3D workarounds: building proxy scenes in Blender and animating camera paths between boxes achieves no more precision than physically recording the move, and takes far longer. It also removes the need to hunt for matching reference clips online — you perform the reference yourself.

One caveat on model support: video-to-video input is not universal across generation models — users on Reddit report, for example, being unable to upload video into Veo's workflow at all. This is where routing matters: because every roster model runs inside invideo, the invideo agent sends your phone reference to a model that natively accepts video-driven motion, Seedance 2.0, so you don't have to verify per-model upload support yourself.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

Match your phone frame to the first frame you've generated. The closer it lines up, the better the output.

— invideo's creative team