You Can Now Turn PDFs Into Cinematic Videos With Google NotebookLM

You Can Now Turn PDFs Into Cinematic Videos With Google NotebookLM — Here’s How It Works

Google replaced NotebookLM's slideshow-based Video Overviews with fully animated cinematic videos. Here is what was launched, who can access it, and how to get started.

Mar 5, 2026

by Damilare Odedina

On Wednesday, Google rolled out Cinematic Video Overview, a new feature in its NotebookLM that will now allow it to produce fully immersive, animated videos. The update replaces the existing Video Overviews format, which produced static slideshows from uploaded documents. Now users can get fully animated videos built directly from their source materials.

According to Google's official announcement, the feature uses three AI models working together: Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro (an image generation model), and Veo 3 (Google's video generation model).

"Gemini now acts as a creative director, making hundreds of structural and stylistic decisions to best tell the story with your sources. It determines the best narrative, visual style and format, and even refines its own work to ensure consistency," it said in the announcement statement.

The videos are built from whatever sources a user uploads, with citations embedded throughout the output linking each point back to its original source.