Tencent's Hunyuan Video-Foley: Filling the Audio Gap in AI Video

When you watch an AI-generated scene and hear nothing but visuals, you’re basically watching a silent movie. Tencent’s new Hunyuan Video-Foley aims to fix that by producing realistic, synchronized sound effects that match the on-screen action. Think wind in the trees, footsteps on gravel, or the crack of thunder, all timed with precision, not plucked from a generic library. It’s not just about adding noise; it’s about crafting an immersive, believable sonic environment that aligns with what you see.

The Core Challenge: Modality Imbalance

For years, many video-to-audio models leaned too heavily on text prompts or generic cues, sometimes ignoring the actual visuals. A beach video paired with a prompt mentioning ocean waves could end up with waves and nothing else — seagulls left out, footsteps unheard. The Tencent team labels this mismatch as udation of modality, which in plain language means the audio doesn’t reflect the full context of the scene.

To change that, they built a pipeline that prioritizes the visual story while still accounting for textual descriptions when relevant. The result is a more holistic soundscape where every clack of a keyboard, rustle of leaves, or distant thunder is anchored to what’s happening on screen.

Building a Robust Foundation: Data and Architecture

• Dataset strategy: The team compiled a library of 100,000 hours of video, audio, and text descriptions. An automated filtering system removed clips with long periods of silence or low-quality audio, ensuring the model learned from reliable, meaningful content.
• Balanced inputs: The model’s architecture weighs visual cues and textual prompts in a way that neither dominates the other. The result is a soundscape that reflects both what is seen and, when useful, what is described in text.
• TV2A framework: Hunyuan Video-Foley operates as an end-to-end Text-Video-to-Audio (TV2A) system designed for high-fidelity sound generation. It leverages a hybrid stack of multimodal and unimodal transformer blocks to capture the nuanced relationships between text, video, and sound.
• High-fidelity audio: A self-developed 48 kHz audio Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is central to reconstructing sound effects, music, and even vocals with professional-grade quality.

This combination isn’t just a gimmick. It’s a deliberate shift toward audio as a core component of AI video, not an afterthought layered on at the end.

How It Performs

In benchmarks against other leading AI models, Hunyuan Video-Foley shows not only better computer-vision and audio metrics but also higher human-perceived quality. Test listeners consistently described the output as more synchronized, more semantically aligned with the visuals, and more natural overall. The team reports improvements across multiple dimensions, including:

• Synchronization accuracy: Audio cues line up with motion and scene changes with minimal latency.
• Contextual relevance: Sounds reflect the broader scene, not just a single cue from a prompt.
• Perceived realism: Listeners rate the audio as closer to what a human Foley artist might create for the same scene.

These results suggest the model can more reliably translate a video’s evolving context into a living, breathing sonic backdrop rather than a mechanical clip of sounds.

Why This Matters for Creators

For filmmakers, game studios, and independent content creators, Foley work is famously labor-intensive. Real-time, high-quality sound design can require a team, specialized sound libraries, and a lot of studio time. Hunyuan Video-Foley promises to democratize this stage of production by enabling the generation of professional-grade, synchronized audio with much greater ease.

• Cost and time savings: The technology could cut production timelines and reduce the need for extensive Foley sessions, especially for smaller teams.
• Creative flexibility: Creators can tweak cues on the fly, re-time sounds to action, or explore alternative soundscapes without starting from scratch.
• Open-source release: Tencent has signaled an openness to broader adoption, which may accelerate innovation as researchers and developers iterate on the model and apply it to new domains like virtual production and immersive media.

Open Science, Open Possibilities

The open-source release turns a laboratory-level breakthrough into a community resource. While real-time, high-fidelity audio generation has practical hurdles (latency, licensing, and hardware constraints among them), making the model accessible invites experimentation and new workflows. In the hands of a video editor, VPS specialist, or indie creator, the tool could become a new creative partner rather than a substitute for human skill.

What’s Next

Tencent’s work points to a broader trend: audio is becoming as programmable as visuals in AI media pipelines. If Hunyuan Video-Foley can scale without sacrificing quality, we could see more dynamic soundscapes in AI-generated trailers, synthetic media for education, and even virtual production pipelines that rely on real-time audio feedback.

Bottom line

Hunyuan Video-Foley doesn’t just whisper audio into AI videos — it gives them voice. By solving the critical problem of audio-visual synchronization and raising the bar for fidelity, Tencent nudges the industry toward a future where AI-driven media can be not only seen but heard in a more convincing, emotionally resonant way.

Sources:

• https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQFhsJpjb4LfaC3BJ5F7iCCrqr_YVPkqZNNOeKsM8gJyWu1qMrZYBDqyZRRnsrUIII2mii8nVrDRktUlDGvsyxjWX9gdZQsryA_O45LHQm4bQPZSD2Xb9WW0vZIM1AaxkMPK7MpWRFCpbbuF9SA8gyLDDJd9uvLk81Qps3JS2urtgbHXzBLp5T_uYg83en5M6bzS8qaXSTH4yeT-uCNjQMFLuWw=
• https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQEAIY25WtgKphg5FVgTldJHgfz8buGndthEWdv0kXrn1mVefEF6MDZhgtQCYGWIit2alS3Q1JMAd6IioTuhatz2B1aYxo8bu8zUzmIl5lO9DCKQnxd4haWnMG04vUpir0epUfHs-QDScKFjEGBIMig=
• https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQFcptTh_VN8U3_0wNsCmiuWtBXyzdqTk1hjiHOZClLmNQGXR2xB_7Hc1PFGLrGmWtmR9NS6CquAivfMKVbhecZP6YWg_Rt1U5MfzyS5rCpoUcGLl2ArNU2nw0KwuWDnUpDIplkXq1T647twZ-E56n_3QiZ0BZH3wmacFHsT1Wsc-O9Lcse4K4D8aaXtmk-82exNpuwYov8fCcz8xQjOdw_E7zvS8xkHub1N0NxUC7xL
• https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQHapdCXVX-fNtk-tSJG4v2T72wxah-qWklpeYPY0_Ho4KzzMyeF1J26wAu0ioL3tttfhTjXiu7anShquLoMZxg4ZD4vrb1jBu6g6YxgRAdOl4Nu4_eRpn1bg2qLv-J18Rmx9lKiMCLIN2ZfGv__xSZBmG9iF8UtEZCoxkiK38vfnPkfjuqEx6FZibNwssdPDmcZUs5CKdhvNi4=