I've been trying to turn midjourney images into motion for about a year now and for most of that time the results were somewhere between uncanny and unusable, faces would melt, physics would break, anything with fine detail would turn to mush.
the thing that finally clicked for me wasn't a better video tool or a better workflow it was realizing I was using the wrong type of midjourney output as my starting point
photorealistic midjourney images make terrible video inputs, every tool I've tried struggles to add motion to something that's already trying to look like a photograph because any imperfection in the motion immediately breaks the realism and your brain notices
but stylized and painterly midjourney outputs make incredible video inputs, like if I generate a scene with a more illustrated or watercolor or impressionist feel and then add subtle motion to that, camera drifts and gentle environmental movement, it looks like a living painting and it's beautiful because your brain doesn't expect photorealism from a painting so the motion doesn't need to be perfect
I've been running these through a few different tools, runway handles the more complex camera movements best, magic hour is surprisingly good for the style-heavy stuff especially when you want to push the painterly quality even further, kling does well with environmental effects like water and clouds
the workflow that's been producing my best results: generate the scene in midjourney with a deliberately artistic style (I lean toward --style raw with a painterly prompt), upscale it, feed it into a video tool with a simple motion prompt like "slow cinematic pan" or "gentle breeze moving through trees", and keep the motion minimal because less is always more with image-to-video
the outputs feel like those animated paintings you see in fantasy games and I've honestly started preferring them over any attempt at photorealistic video generation
anyone else landed on a similar conclusion about stylized inputs working better than photorealistic ones for image-to-video or am I in a niche of one here
[link] [comments] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1s8z3q0/after_a_year_of_experimenting_i_think_ive_found/