An AI video generator that reads your website first

You can tell which kind of AI video generator you are looking at within about ten seconds. If the first thing it shows you is an empty box asking what your video should be about, it is a prompt tool. If it asks for a web address, it is reading something.

Both are useful. They are not useful for the same job, and most of the frustration people report with AI video comes from picking the first when they needed the second.

What a prompt-based generator actually knows about you

Nothing. That is not a criticism, it is the design. You type a description, and a model that has seen an enormous amount of video produces something that matches the description. The quality of what comes back is now genuinely high. The problem is narrower than quality: the tool has no idea what your company looks like.

So you get a video that is about your subject and looks like nobody in particular. For a mood piece or a social experiment that is fine. For anything with your name at the end of it, you now have a second job: making the output look like it came from you. That job is usually larger than making the video was.

What reading a website gives a generator instead

A public web page is a surprisingly complete brand document, and almost nobody treats it as one. Sitting in the markup of a page you already own:

• The colours, as declared values rather than as a designer’s memory of them. Not "a sort of dark blue", but the exact one, the one your buttons already use.
• The typeface, named, with the weights you actually load. If you pay for a face, the page says which.
• The shapes. How round your corners are. How much air sits between things. Whether your design is tight and dense or wide and slow.
• The writing. Sentence length, whether you use contractions, whether you say "we" or "the company". A film that narrates in a voice unlike your site reads as somebody else talking about you.

None of that has to be guessed, and none of it has to be typed in. It is already published, at an address you can paste in one action.

Why "from a website" is a harder problem than it sounds

Reading the page is the easy part. The difficulty is knowing which of the forty colours on a modern web page is the colour.

A typical page declares a background, a text colour, three greys, a border, a hover state, two shades for shadows, whatever a cookie banner brought with it, and somewhere in there the brand. Take the most frequent colour and you get the background. Take the most saturated and you get an error-state red that appears on one form.

The honest approach is to rule things out: anything too dark to be an accent, anything too pale to survive on a screen, anything that is clearly the ink the body text is set in. What survives that is usually right, and when it is not, the answer is to let a person correct it in one click rather than pretend the machine was certain.

When the prompt tool is the right answer

Plainly: when there is no brand to read. A personal project. An idea you are testing before it has a name. Something where photoreal footage is the point, because a drawn film cannot produce a real coastline at golden hour and should not try.

Also when you want something specific that exists nowhere in your own material. If the film needs a dragon, no amount of reading your website will produce one.

When reading the site is the right answer

When the film has to sit next to everything else you make. An explainer on your own home page. A launch video that runs the week your site is redesigned. Anything a customer sees within a minute of seeing your actual product.

The test is simple. Put the video beside your website. If a stranger would guess they came from two different companies, the generator started in the wrong place.

What to ask before you commit to one

• Where does it get the brand from? If the answer is "you upload a logo", it is a prompt tool with a logo slot.
• What does it hand back? A file you own, or a link to a page on their service that stops working when you stop paying.
• Can you change a decision it made? A generator that cannot be corrected is a slot machine.
• What happens to what you send it? Whether your material trains their next model is a question with a real answer, and you are entitled to it in writing.

Try it against your own address

The argument is easier to see than to read. Put your own web address into Nine's free page and watch what it takes: your colours, laid over Nine's own films so you can see them move. That costs nothing and needs no account. If the colours it found do not look like you, you have learned something useful about the approach before spending anything. A short film of your own, built from your colours, your typeface and the way you write, comes with a plan.