Turn any document into study video presentations with NotebookLM

The Rundown: NotebookLM's new Video Overview feature transforms your uploaded documents into AI-narrated video presentations with slides, pulling images, diagrams, quotes, and numbers directly from your content.

🧰 Who is this useful for:

• Students wanting to transform dense research papers into digestible video summaries
• Educators creating visual explanations from complex materials
• Business professionals turning reports into presentation-ready videos
• Content creators repurposing written content into video format

STEP 1: Set Up Your Notebook

Head over to NotebookLM and either open an existing notebook or create a new one. Upload the documents you want to transform into a video presentation. You can add PDFs, Google Docs, web pages, YouTube videos, or even images - up to 50 sources per notebook.

For this tutorial, we'll use the famous “Attention Is All You Need” paper, the foundational research that introduced the Transformer architecture. This paper includes complex diagrams, mathematical formulations, and technical concepts that are perfect for video visualization.

STEP 2: Access the Video Overview Feature

Once your documents are uploaded, look for the “Studio” panel on the right side of your screen. You'll see a colorful grid with four main options: Audio Overview, Video Overview, Mind Map, and Reports.

Click on “Video Overview” to initiate the generation of your video. The AI will begin processing your content in the background, so you can continue working on other tasks or even generate additional content while you wait.

STEP 3: Customize Your Video (Optional)

To customize your video, click the three dots menu next to “Video Overviews” and select “Customize.” Here, you can specify topics to focus on, indicate your learning goals, describe the target audience, and much more.

For example, you could customize with prompts like:

• “Focus on the Transformer architecture diagrams and make it accessible for computer science students”
• “I'm already familiar with basic neural networks; emphasize the self-attention mechanism”
• “Create a presentation suitable for AI researchers who need to understand the practical applications”

STEP 4: Review and Share Your Video

Once NotebookLM generates your Video Overview, you can control playback speed, navigate using the slider, skip forward or rewind, and enter full-screen mode. The AI host creates new visuals to help illustrate points while also pulling in images, diagrams, quotes and numbers from your documents.

To share your video, click “Share” in the video player and ensure your notebook is shared with recipients or made public. You can also download the video as an MP4 file to use elsewhere.

Pro tip: You can now create and store multiple video outputs in a single notebook, allowing you to create different versions tailored to different audiences or focusing on different aspects of your content.