Sora AI Video Generator – Complete Guide (Launched)

Giving a new direction to tech junkies to be obsessed with once again, Open AI launched Sora for general public use on 09th December 2024. 

An AI video generation model that has been in beta since February 2024, Sora has a version called ‘Sora Turbo’ that ChatGPT subscribers can now use for text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video generation included in their subscription. 

Open AI took time to reinforce Sora with safety measures, avoiding abusive AI video generations that crossed limits, but the wait seems to be worth it!

Let’s learn all about Sora AI and what it can do. 

What Is Sora AI?

Sora AI is a text-to-video model developed by OpenAI. With research sourced from DALL E, GPT models, and publicly available data, Sora AI can convert images or text prompts into videos of up to 20 seconds and 1080p. 

Sora Turbo AI or Open AI Sora Turbo is basically the name of the latest update to Sora available to general public use. 

Sora can create complex scenes with simple prompts, accurate details, and multiple characters. 

Sora AI technical specifications: 

What was initially thought to be available at a separate price, Open AI has managed to offer Sora AI along with their subscription to ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro.

How Does Sora Work & Its Features

As mentioned above, Sora AI is a text-conditional diffusion model trained on a vast collection of images and videos of various aspect ratios and resolutions. It employs a transformer architecture that uses spacetime patches of video and image latent codes, much like how LLMs (large language models) work with text tokens. 

Sora takes static noise and transforms it into relevant videos by sequentially removing the noise, leveraging the same re-captioning technique used by DALL-E 3 to generate highly visual outputs. 

Here’s an example of the video I generated on Sora: 

With the launch of the model, Sora AI turned out to be more than just an AI video generator. As good as Sora AI is at generating a video, it is equally good at editing those generations, too. 

Sora AI can not only edit your AI video generations but also check out what others have generated and created, as well as over videos generated by others!

The features that make Sora stand out are: 

1. Presets

Presets offer themes or filters that can be applied to your prompt to get a style-specific output. The available preset options currently are – Balloon World, Stop Motion, Archival, Film Noir, and Cardboard & Papercraft. 

2. Storyboard

The storyboard features lets you be the director of your video. This feature allows you to control any specific movements, effects, or actions you want the characters or elements in your video to make. 

3. Recut

This feature allows you to trim and edit the generations you make and extend the best parts of the video that work well for you. With this, you can split, slip, trim the generated video, and edit with different presets, and resolutions, and can even generate variations. 

4. Remix

Remix allows you to make specific changes in your video. Using text prompts, you can use this tool to make specific changes in a generated video with a variance of – subtle, mild, and strong. 

5. Blend 

The blend feature on Sora will allow you to mix an existing image or video with the generated video. If the Remix feature does not get you the changes you want, you can use Blend to provide directive changes with an image or video as source media. 

6. Loop

Lastly, the Loop feature loops the generated video into an endless video or GIF. 

Sora Availability: Who Can Access It?

Sora is now available for the general public to use and is not limited to “Red teamers.” However, not everyone can get to use Sora. You can use Sora only if:

• You have an active ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Plus subscription
• You are not from China, North Korea, or selected European countries.
• Registered for Sora out of heavy traffic

When launched, Sora experienced heavy traffic to the website, thereby limiting the account creation to Sora, even for existing ChatGPT subscribers.

How To Use Sora?

Here are some potential ways users could use Sora AI’s capabilities once it becomes available:

• Generate high-quality videos for marketing, advertising, and entertainment purposes.
• Bring written stories, scripts, and scenarios to life through AI-generated videos. Filmmakers and writers could use Sora to visualize their creative ideas quickly.
• Produce animated videos, characters, and environments for movies, games, and other interactive media.
• Create realistic product demos, simulations, and visualizations for eCommerce, marketing, and training purposes.
• Simulate digital worlds and landscapes for education, gaming, and immersive experiences like virtual reality. 
• Users can use Sora’s built-in editing tools to modify, refine, and customize the AI-generated videos to fit specific needs. 

Challenges And Limitations Of Sora

Despite its impressive features, the current version of Sora AI is facing several challenges and limitations that OpenAI is working on:

• Limited Video Length: Currently, Sora can only generate videos up to 20 seconds in length, which may not be sufficient for specific use cases.
• Audio Generation: While Sora has the capability to incorporate audio, the quality and accuracy of the generated audio may need further improvement.
• Credit availability: With a basic ChatGPT Plus subscription, you only get 1,000 credits which is not enough. For example, a well-generated prompt of the highest quality and length required more than 100 credits to generate.
• Other Limitations: The current version of Sora may not be able to understand complex languages and ambiguous prompts that may involve logical reasoning or multiple sentences. 

What Does The Future Look Like With Sora?

Sora AI represents a significant leap forward in the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the real-world application of AI models. If the tool continues to evolve and improve, video production and content creation for creators will be much easier, more effective, and time-saving. 

However, professional video creators, editors, and stock video providers may feel threatened by such evolution of AI models.

A good news of sorts is that – Sora is not perfect. Sora still has a lot of room for improvement. The results received while testing Sora were not always consistent when we used it. 

What Open AI released as samples during announcements are minute-long videos developed by experts with probably limitless access to Sora. 

For general public use, Sora can only generate videos up to 20 seconds in length and 1080p. While this might seem like a limitation, this is where most AI video generators stop!

Open AI is just starting with access to Sora, and as the model gets trained and more updates are received, Sora AI will be the ultimate AI video generator that will be better than all. 

Wrapping Up!

It is very exciting to be in a time where the prime of technology is available for general use with Sora AI.

Branching out from user query assistance, Open AI is surely on its way to becoming an all-around AI tool that can make our lives easier.

Available with a ChatGPT subscription from $20 per month, you should definitely test out Sora. As we test this tool further, and as others do too, we can discover more ways to use and not to use Sora AI!