How do you use phone footage to control camera movement in AI video generation?

Record the camera move yourself on a smartphone, upload that clip to the invideo agent, and the agent extracts the motion and applies it to your AI-generated scene via Seedance 2.0. The phone clip is a motion driver only — it's discarded — and one clip can replace 50+ prompt-engineered generation attempts.

Use your phone footage as a motion reference, not as content: the movement gets extracted and transferred onto a completely different AI-generated scene. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with the current generation models available, and its agent handles the motion extraction and routing for you. The workflow is four steps.

1. Record the move on your phone. Frame the shot the way you want it, hit record, and physically perform the camera move — a dolly-in, a simple pan, or a compound push-in-and-swirl all transfer. What you point the phone at doesn't matter: in one documented case, a toy figure filmed on a table transferred a dolly-in motion to a cinematic shot of a person riding a horse in a desert. No gimbal, drone, or rig is needed — the entire capture requires only a smartphone.

2. Match your framing to the first frame of your target video. This is the single biggest quality lever: line up your phone recording's opening frame with the first generated frame of the scene you want the motion applied to. The closer the alignment, the better the motion transfer — a mismatched frame degrades the final output.

3. Upload the clip to the invideo agent and prompt the transfer. Tell the invideo agent the uploaded video is the driver for the camera move on your target scene. The agent extracts the motion data and routes it to Seedance 2.0, which renders the final shot with the transferred movement.

4. Render and review. The generated scene carries your physical camera motion; the phone clip itself never appears in the film.

The method replaces two older approaches: prompt engineering (one production burned 50+ generations, hundreds of credits, and over an hour of referencing to chase a single complex move that one phone clip then delivered) and 3D camera-path workflows in Blender, where you build proxy scenes and animate a camera between boxes — physically recording the move achieves equivalent precision without the scene-building. It also scales to any move type without hunting for matching reference clips online: if your body can perform the motion with a phone, it transfers.

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