Driving Video

Simple Definition

A driving video is a reference video clip that provides movement, timing, facial expression, or body motion for an AI-generated or AI-replaced character, so the model has real motion to follow instead of inventing it from a text description alone.

Why It Matters

Generating believable movement from text alone is one of the least reliable parts of current AI video tools. A driving video gives the model something concrete to track, someone’s actual walk, gesture, or mouth movement, which produces far more natural and consistent results than a purely text-prompted animation, especially for precise actions like lip-sync or specific gestures.

Example

A creator records themselves delivering a line of dialogue, then uses that recording as a driving video to animate an AI-generated character’s face and mouth movements, so the character’s lip-sync and expression match real human timing instead of an AI guess at how speech should look.