Hey everyone!
I do real estate videography in LA, mostly higher end residential stuff in areas like Los Feliz and Silver Lake, and for the past year or so I've been slowly incorporating AI video into my pre-production process in a way that has genuinely changed how I work with clients. I wanted to share what that actually looked like in practice because most of what I see online about AI video is either people hyping it up way too much or dismissing it entirely, and the reality for working videographers is somewhere messier and more interesting than either of those takes.
How it started
About a year ago I had a client, a real estate agent who works with a lot of out of state buyers, ask me if I could show her roughly what a property walkthrough would look like before we committed to a shoot day. She wanted to send something to her client overseas to get buy-in before flying them out. I didn't really have a good answer for her at the time. I sent over some reference videos from past projects and she was polite about it but I could tell it wasn't what she was asking for.
That stuck with me. I started looking into whether AI video tools could fill that gap, not as a replacement for the actual shoot but as a way to give clients a rough visual direction early in the process. What I found was that the tools varied a lot more than I expected in ways that took me a while to understand.
What I actually learned from using them
The first thing that surprised me was how differently each model handles interior spaces. Lighting consistency from room to room, the way natural light comes through windows, how furniture reads on screen. These things matter a lot for real estate work and some models handled them way better than others. Veo ended up being the most reliable for that kind of controlled interior work, the output was clean enough that two clients I showed early concepts to didn't realize it wasn't footage I had already shot.
For exterior shots and neighborhood context, wider establishing stuff, I got better results from Sora even though getting access was more annoying than it should be. And for anything more stylized, like a concept reel to help a client visualize a renovation before it happened, Wan turned out to be more useful than I expected going in.
The bigger problem I ran into was that managing all of these tools separately was eating up way more time than I anticipated. Different platforms, different credit systems, files scattered all over the place. I was spending a chunk of every morning just getting organized before I could do any actual work. Someone in a Facebook group for videographers mentioned Prism as a way to manage multiple models from one place and that ended up solving most of that problem for me. There's also a pretty good discussion on r/videography from a few months back about AI pre-viz workflows that's worth reading if you want more perspectives on this, and this breakdown on YouTube goes into how other commercial shooters are thinking about integrating these tools without it replacing their core work.
What my process looks like now
I now offer a concept preview as part of my standard package for any listing over a certain price point. It takes me a couple of hours to put together something rough enough to be useful and clients respond really well to it. The agent I mentioned at the beginning has referred me to three other agents in her office specifically because of this, she brings it up every time.
The actual shoot still matters just as much as it always did. The AI stuff is just a way to get everyone on the same page before we get there so we're not making decisions on the day that should have been made weeks earlier.
If anyone has questions about how this works in practice for real estate specifically I'm happy to go into more detail.
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