our ai video ads looked great in the editor and flopped on facebook
too clean. too saturated. inky blacks, glossy highlights. people scroll past anything that looks like an ad, and ai footage screams ad
so my grokbot video agent now runs a realism grade on every finished video before it ships. same idea as the tiktok realism filters. this one little change made our videos perform noticeably better on fb
you don’t need to touch ffmpeg yourself. copy the prompt below into your grok bot (or any ai agent that can run code) and it’ll set it up for you
the prompt (copy-paste this)
Set up a “phone realism grade” as the final post-production step for every video you make or edit for me. 1. Install ffmpeg on your computer if it isn’t already there. 2. Save this as a reusable script called realism_grade.sh that takes an input video and writes <name>-graded.mp4. Apply this filter chain in order: - eq: saturation 0.95, contrast 1.10, brightness -0.025 - colortemperature: 5600K - hue: +3 degrees - colorbalance: rs=-0.02 bs=0.04 rm=-0.015 bm=0.035 rh=-0.025 bh=0.025 - curves (all channels): 0/0.08 0.30/0.35 0.70/0.70 1/0.94 - scale to fit 1080x1920 (keep aspect ratio, pad, never stretch) - fps=60 by frame duplication only. NEVER use optical-flow interpolation (it warps hands and faces) - convert to BT.709 limited (tv) range, yuv420p - encode H.264 High profile, CRF 17, AAC 192k audio, -movflags +faststart Make grain (noise filter) and sharpening (unsharp, luma only) optional settings that are OFF by default. 3. Test it on one of my videos. Export a single frame from before and after and show me them side by side. 4. Save this as a skill/routine: from now on, every finished video gets graded as the LAST step, after editing and captions and right before delivery. Never grade a video twice. 5. If my footage looks plastic or too clean, suggest turning on grain (3-8) or sharpen (0.3-0.6). Don’t change anything else without asking me.
that’s it. your bot writes the script, tests it, shows you the before/after, and does it on every video from then on
what it’s actually doing (so you can sanity check your bot)
- flatter color. saturation down ~5%, contrast up ~10%, slight underexposure. phones protect highlights so they never look candy-bright
- slightly off white balance. a small kelvin nudge + 3° hue shift. phone auto white balance is never perfect
- cool cast. a touch less red and more blue across shadows, mids and highlights, like a phone sensor
- the tone curve (biggest one). blacks lifted to ~8% grey for milky phone shadows, whites pulled to 94% so nothing clips. ai footage has dead blacks and blown whites
- 9:16 at 60fps. ai clips are often 24fps which reads as “film”. duplicate frames, never interpolate
- clean export. fb re-compresses anyway, so a clean master gets you realistic upload softness without blocky junk
we keep grain and sharpening off because we ask for grain in the generation prompt. turn them on only if your footage looks plastic
tweaking it
just tell your bot in plain english:
- “make the color a bit flatter” (saturation toward 0.90)
- “milkier shadows” (curve black point toward 0.10)
- “warmer” (temperature toward 5000K)
- “it looks filtered” means you’ve gone too far, ask it to dial back to defaults
ask it to change one thing at a time and show you a before/after frame each time that’s the whole thing. if you want to see how my full ai team builds and launches the ads, the playbook is pinned on my profile