Record yourself once. Then ship a month of vertical ads while you’re eating lunch. No camera. No studio. Just your face on autopilot.
My AI research agent pulled the latest prices and policies, and the math is finally boring - minutes, credits, and characters. The trick isn’t the tools. It’s your capture and your batching.
Here’s the honest path to a scary‑real avatar that looks like you and sells like you.
Pipeline 1 - Best quality
- Stack: Synthesia personal avatar with Studio Express-1 + ElevenLabs Professional Voice Cloning.
- What you send: 30–90 seconds of clean 4K or 1080p talking head, neutral background, soft light. Voice: at least 30 minutes of WAV, ideally 1–3 hours, different emotions.
- Onboarding speed: about 1–3 weeks for voice, up to 10 days for avatar.
- How you produce: write a 30–60s script, generate voice in ElevenLabs, drop WAV into Synthesia, enable premium lip‑sync, add B‑roll and captions, export 9:16. Duplicate to 16:9 if you need horizontal.
- Cost per 60s video: one video that month is pricey - roughly $190 all‑in on subs. Batch 10 and it drops to about $19 each. At 100 videos spread across months, around $15 each. You’re buying realism, micro‑expressions, and full‑body options.
Pipeline 2 - Best price to quality
- Stack: HeyGen custom avatar using Avatar IV + ElevenLabs Creator plan. Instant clone for speed, or PVC if you want max fidelity later.
- What you send: 1–2 minutes of clean 1080p talking head and a live consent clip. Voice: 1–5 minutes for instant, or upgrade later with a bigger dataset.
- Onboarding speed: hours, not weeks.
- How you produce: same flow - script, voice in ElevenLabs, drop WAV in HeyGen, choose Avatar IV, add subtle motion, captions, export.
- Cost per 60s video: subs are about $51 for the month. With included credits, 10 videos cost roughly $5 each. Need more? Extra compute is around $1 per video. At 100 videos, you’re near $1–2 each before your time.
Reality check
- There’s no gold‑standard lip‑sync benchmark. Friends may still spot tiny AI tells. Your lighting, mic, and steady delivery are 80 percent of the result.
- Platforms keep tweaking rules. Label realistic AI, get explicit consent for likeness, and don’t be cute with deception. It kills ads fast.
Who is this actually for
- Pipeline 1 - brands and ad buyers who need the best “is that really you” look.
- Pipeline 2 - founders and lean teams who want near‑photoreal now and killer batching economics.
My take: stop filming every week. Capture once, template scenes, and batch 10–50 spots. Vertical first - then reframe to horizontal in a click. The winner is the team that ships, not the team that argues about pores. 🤖
Which pipeline would you bet on this quarter - quality or value?