AI Video Tools I Actually Use on My Hindi Animation Channel

I run @9_face_toon, a Hindi cartoon and short-form animation page with around 40K followers each on Instagram and YouTube, mostly Indian audience. So when AI video tools appear, I do not test them by recording one demo and writing about it. I either use them on content I am actually going to post, or I do not use them at all.

Some of the videos on the channel are pure traditional 2D animation, frame by frame. Others use AI for specific parts where it genuinely saves time. It depends entirely on the content. A character-driven story still needs hand animation. A quick reel with an AI voice and a generated background can be put together very differently.

The four tools below are the ones I keep coming back to. The rest, I have either tested briefly or watched other creators use, and I am going to be honest about that distinction instead of pretending I have used everything.

CapCut is the one I open every single time. The AI features that actually matter on a daily basis are auto captions, audio cleanup, and background removal. On Hindi captions specifically, the auto-caption accuracy is usable now. I still correct a few words per minute, but it is far less work than typing captions from scratch.

Background removal works well for talking-head clips and short character cutouts when I want to drop an animated character into a different scene. Audio cleanup is the underrated one. A lot of voice-over recordings here happen in rooms with fan noise or traffic outside, and CapCut quietly handles most of it without needing a separate audio pass.

Almost all of this is on the free tier. For anyone making short-form content in India, this is the tool to learn first. The paid plan is only worth it once you outgrow the free limits, which takes a long time for normal use.

ElevenLabs is the AI voice tool I have used the most. The difference between this and older text-to-speech is that the output sounds like a person talking, with intonation that actually matches the sentence. For animation work especially, this matters a lot. A flat robotic voice ruins a character scene immediately.

I use it mostly for short reel voice-overs and for placeholder voices when I am still figuring out the timing of an animation scene. For full-length emotional Hindi delivery it still has limits, but for narration and short character lines it is good enough that most viewers cannot tell.

The free tier gives a small monthly quota in characters. That is enough to experiment with and produce a few short clips per month. For anyone doing regular voice-over work for short content, the basic paid plan is the first AI subscription I would add after CapCut.

Veo is Google's text-to-video model. I started using it when I needed short live-action style clips that would have taken forever to animate by hand. Moving crowds, weather, fast background action behind a character scene.

Where it actually helps: a few seconds of moving texture, environment shots, or ambient B-roll. Where it still struggles: consistent characters across multiple clips, readable text inside scenes, and very specific actions. I treat it like a stock-footage generator with a prompt instead of a search bar, and that framing has made it more useful for me than treating it like a full video generator.

It is not a replacement for animation. It is a separate tool for filling in parts that do not need character animation. For Hindi narrative content specifically, I use it more for visual context than for storytelling, because the storytelling on the channel mostly happens through dialogue and character work.

For thumbnails, I have moved most of my workflow to Gemini's image generation. It is fast, it is included with my Google account, and it handles prompt edits without making me start over from a blank canvas. I still finish the thumbnail in a normal design tool, but the rough image idea comes from Gemini first instead of being designed from scratch.

For animation reference art, character poses, expressions, and scene compositions, I sometimes use Gemini to quickly explore visual ideas before drawing the final frames. It is faster than searching reference images one by one. The output is not what gets published, but it speeds up the decision-making part of pre-production.

If you do not have access to paid image tools, Gemini is a genuinely usable starting point. The output quality has improved noticeably over the past year, and for thumbnail composition it is usually enough.

Runway ML keeps getting recommended for high-quality short clips. I have seen creators in the animation community use it and the demos look impressive. I have not used it enough on my own work to write a real opinion, so I am not going to fake one. The free credit limit is the part most people complain about.

Pika Labs and Descript also come up regularly in creator discussions. Descript is for podcast-style editing where you edit the transcript and the video follows the cut, and Pika is for short generative clips. If your workflow centres on talking-head content, Descript is the one most people seem happy with.

I am listing these honestly because the point of this post is to be useful, not to sound like I have tested every tool that exists. If you use any of them and have a working setup, that is worth knowing. But I cannot recommend something I have only opened for ten minutes.

Consistent characters across clips are still a problem in almost every AI video tool. If your content depends on the same character appearing in different scenes, AI generation is not yet a replacement for proper animation.

Hands and text inside generated scenes are still unreliable. Faces in motion are still uneven. For anyone doing serious narrative animation, AI is a supporting tool, not a primary tool.

Free tier limits also force you to be intentional with prompts. Every generation costs a credit, and the second or third attempt is usually when you get something usable. Plan the prompt before you generate, not while you are generating.

For a typical short-form animation reel on @9_face_toon, the mix is traditional animation for the character work, ElevenLabs for placeholder or short voice-over, CapCut for editing and Hindi captions, and a Gemini-generated thumbnail. Occasionally a Veo clip for the background if the scene calls for live-action environment.

For a quicker content piece where the goal is volume rather than craft, the mix tilts more toward AI: Veo for background visuals, an AI voice for narration, CapCut for assembly. The trade-off is honest. These videos look more like everyone else's AI content. They get views, but they are not what builds long-term audience trust.

The reason I switch between approaches is that not every video on a channel has to be the same kind of work. The most loyal audience comes from the hand-animated pieces. AI tools handle the supporting content around them.

Start with CapCut. Learn captions, learn cuts, learn audio cleanup. Most short-form content lives or dies on pacing and captions, not on AI tricks.

After that, add ElevenLabs if you do voice-overs and your voice is the bottleneck. Then a free image tool like Gemini for thumbnails. Veo and other video generators come last, because they are the easiest to over-rely on while ignoring the parts that actually matter to a viewer.

The honest truth from running this channel is that AI tools speed up production. They do not make a video work. The first three seconds, the script, and the captioning still decide whether a viewer stays. AI cannot fix a slow opening.