Show HN: DeepReel – AI Video Agent that turns blogs/docs into polished videos
by sahildeepreel | 2025-08-14 16:47:06+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Sahil, founder of DeepReel (https://deepreel.com).

The Problem We're Solving

We all know video is critical for growth and engagement, but creating it is a huge bottleneck. Creating professional videos still takes days or weeks per piece.

Current AI video tools help, but they still make you juggle everything – you write scripts, choose visuals, pick music, make hundreds of micro-decisions. It's faster than agencies but nowhere near fast enough for scale.

Our Background

We started as an AI avatar company in 2023 and were the first startup to automate custom avatar production – letting anyone create photorealistic avatars within 24 hours instead of 10 days. We've worked with Hollywood celebrities and athletes, including a collaboration with ElevenLabs and Aston Martin F1 team to create Fernando Alonso's AI avatar (https://elevenlabs.io/blog/ai-lonso).

But we kept seeing users cobbling together N8N workflows and multiple AI tools just to add captions, sync voiceovers, and combine avatars into basic videos. That's when we realized the real problem wasn't just better avatars – but the entire fragmented video production pipeline.

What We Built

DeepReel's "AI Video Genie" acts like an entire video production team:

1. Drop in a blog URL, PDF, or just type a topic

2. Our AI Video Genie writes a script with engaging hooks, adds a lifelike AI presenter or voiceover, sources visuals, music, captions, and adds smart cuts and transitions all while keeping your video on-brand

3. Within minutes, you get a complete, professional explainer video ready for social media, YouTube, or your website

Our key insight was that the bottleneck isn't just editing tools; it's the hundreds of creative decisions. So, we built an AI agent that handles the creative heavy lifting for you. You can still tweak everything in our simple editor, but the heavy lifting is done for you.

Technical Highlights

- Context-aware Scripting: We use a fine-tuned LLM (on a dataset of high-performing educational videos) to break down source text into engaging scenes with hooks, not just summarize it.

- Semantic B-Roll Matching: Instead of simple keyword search, we use multi-modal embeddings to find stock or AI-generated visuals that semantically and stylistically match the script's narration for each scene.

- Automated Video Editing: Our agent handles the full timeline, making decisions on pacing, effects, transitions, and animations to keep the video dynamic without manual input.

- We have 100+ photorealistic AI presenters & voices in 30+ languages.

Who is it for?

Anyone who wants to turn their existing content (blogs, docs, articles) into a steady stream of videos for social media, YouTube, and video SEO.

- Founders wanting to build authority and social presence

- Marketers at B2C focussed service companies (fintech, healthcare, legal) who need to educate customers and explain complex topics simply

- Content-heavy businesses looking to repurpose blogs/article archives into videos

Since beta launch, we've processed thousands of videos with an average time from idea to finished video of under 5 minutes. Pricing starts at $0.2/second (pay-as-you-go) or $25/month subscription.

What We'd Love Feedback On

1. Workflow & Quality: How intuitive is the process? Are the AI-generated videos a good "80% there" starting point? What was missing for you to publish it?

2. Founder Content: For founders here, would you use this to build your personal brand? Does it feel authentic enough?

3. Other Use Cases: We're focused on explainers from existing content. What other video workflows are painful and could use this level of automation?

The platform is live at https://deepreel.com. We'd be grateful if you'd try it with one of your blog posts and share your thoughts!

Happy to answer any questions.