OpenAI’s 12 Days of OpenAI event has reached its third day, and the company has released the long-awaited Sora AI video generator. Sora is now accessible through its website to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the U.S. and many other countries. Sora uses a more enhanced version of the model introduced in February called Sora Turbo, which creates better videos more quickly than the previous one.
Beyond the simple text-to-video features, Sora Turbo includes some creative flexibility. for example, You can submit a text prompt to make a video from scratch, as well as animate a still image, or remix an existing video based on a new text prompt
Don’t expect to make full-length feature films right away, though. Sora runs on a credit system similar to ChatGPT and DALL-E. ChatGPT Plus subscribers get 1,000 monthly credits, which equals 50 videos at 720p resolution of five seconds each that will be prioritized for creation.
If your’e willing to pay 20 dollars for the chatGpt pro  subscription, you can get longer, higher quality videos of up to 20 seconds at 1080p and a as many as ten times priority videos as with Plus. You can also have up to five videos processing simultaneously. If you use up all 500 priority slots, you’ll still get unlimited video generations below the priority level, but none of the videos will have the OpenAI logo. That’s not the case on the Plus plan, though. Even if you’re not making a video, you can check out the Sora Explore page and see what others are creating.
Things to note:
UK and Europe not included just yet
There’s dissapointing news for those in the UK and Europe who are keen on using Sora. The AI video maker is not available there yet, and the delay has no possible ending. It’s a familiar situation for OpenAI products facing the region’s severe regulatory landscape.
This cautious rollout re-affirms the restrictions faced by ChataGPT, including a complete ban by Italy. More so, DALL-E’s image maker was also slow to launch in the region as OpenAI navigated the complexities of European AI governance
Storyboarding
One outstanding element of the new Sora platform is the Storyboards feature. Essentially, you can set up multiple prompts in a row to design a narrative that the AI will turn into a sequence of multiple videos that can be merged into one unified narrative.
So, let’s say you might want to make a video explaining the water cycle. With Storyboards, you could generate a sequence showing water evaporating from a lake, condensing into clouds, and eventually falling back to earth as rain – all animated and guided by simple text prompts. You could tell all kinds of fun stories and link them together in a unified style rather than expecting that the AI will maintain that preferred look with multiple independent prompts. You can see an example of a Storyboard below.
Blending
Another important feature of Sora is Blending.
Just Like the Storyboard feature, Blending is about combining videos. Though, while Storyboard is about linking videos across time, Blending merges two scenes through a transition that works naturally with both. Sora can easily combine unrelated lighting, perspective, motion, and other elements and mix them into a one piece that works harmoniously well together.
Say you have an AI-generated clip of a serene forest and another clip showing a busy city of the future. Blending would let you show the forest transform into the city skyline. The smooth transition could be very suggestive if you’re telling a story of urbanization or maybe of someone travelling from the countryside to the big city. Even the ocean and outer space could link together, with bubbles changing into twirling suns of a distant galaxy as you open your sci-fi movie, possibly.
Safety and competition
Obviously, the usual quality and content safety issues are also peculiar with Sora, as with any other AI video generator. That’s why videos generated with Sora will have visible watermarks unless you pay to remove them.
All of them will contain metadata that can track their source, though, so even without a watermark, a video made with Sora will be easily noticed. The idea is to address growing concerns about misinformation, deep fakes, and AI manipulation. And you won’t be allowed to upload images or videos to Sora without agreeing to guidelines that prohibits putting out contents involving minors, violence, explicit material, or anything copyrighted. Ultimately You could get suspended or banned if caught.
Those restrictions aren’t unique to Sora, but they put it in the same arena as other AI video makers. There’s been an enormous burst of interest in the technology, with commensurate releases of alternatives like Runway, Stability AI, Pika, and Luma Labs’ Dream Machine, among others.
