OpenAI has officially released Sora, on Day 3 of their “12 Days of OpenAI” series. After months of suspense since its first announcement in April 2024, Sora has proven itself to be a great leap in the AI-generated video content space. OpenAI released the Sora Turbo model, the high-end accelerated version of the original Sora Model. Let’s look at newly added features and try it out!

Our holiday gift to you: Sora is here. https://t.co/UhdmYuGHtT pic.twitter.com/ljoruQsfO0

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 9, 2024

What is Sora?

Sora is a text-to-video generator that utilizes advanced diffusion models and transformer architectures to create videos based on written descriptions. These videos are generated by starting with noise and progressively refining it over multiple steps. This diffusion process allows the model to produce realistic, coherent video sequences from a wide range of textual inputs.

Building on OpenAI’s prior successes with GPT, DALL·E, and CLIP, Sora introduces a major leap forward by allowing users to create videos from scratch or extend existing ones based on text prompts. Whether generating an entirely new video or animating an image, Sora’s ability to create visually compelling narratives directly from natural language is unprecedented.

Capabilities of OpenAI Sora

• Generate Videos from Text: Create videos from simple text prompts.
• Extend Existing Videos: Continue or modify existing videos.
• Animate Images: Bring still images to life with animation.
• Handle Complex Scenes: Maintain continuity across multiple frames.
• Scale and Adapt: Generate videos in various formats and lengths.
• Transform Videos: Modify existing videos based on text prompts.

Key Improvements

• Realistic Physics: More natural object movement.
• Longer Videos: Create videos up to 20 seconds.
• Enhanced Lighting: More visually appealing videos with dynamic lighting effects.

Putting OpenAI Sora to Test

Prompt: Create a video on white dog playing with kitten

Prompt: Create a video of a dancing dog on a beach.

Storyboard Prompt

Prompt:

• A vivid animation shows a psychotropic molecule being ingested, depicted as a small, glowing particle entering the mouth. The background is a stylized representation of the human digestive system, with swirling colors suggesting the beginning of a complex journey.
• The molecule travels through the bloodstream, surrounded by red and white blood cells. It’s depicted as a bright, luminescent particle moving swiftly through a network of blood vessels.
• The molecule reaches the blood-brain barrier, depicted as a shimmering wall, and penetrates it, entering the brain. The scene becomes more intricate, with neurons and synapses lighting up as the molecule interacts with them.

Prompt:

1. In a warmly lit children’s room, a little boy and girl sit inside a cozy makeshift yurt constructed from plaid blankets and pillows. They are dressed in playful hats and felt boots, surrounded by the soft glow of lamps. The children giggle as they play with a toy reindeer, their eyes sparkling with imagination.
2. The children close their eyes tightly, a sense of anticipation in the air.
3. As they open their eyes, they transform into adults, standing in front of a modern hotel landscape in Yakutia, surrounded by real yurts and a vast, snowy winter scene.

Observation: While creating the videos using the ChatGPT Plus account took me a lot of time, I see there is a lot of scope for improvement.

How to Access Sora?

Sora can be acceseed via the new website – sora.com. You can use your ChatGPT plans to get access to the model:

• ChatGPT Plus Account: This plan gives you 50 generations per month. These could be related to the number of text-to-video creations or other specific tasks per month.
• OpenAI Pro Account: This offers unlimited generations in slow queue mode, plus 500 faster generations per month. This tier seems to be focused on offering more flexibility, with the option to process tasks faster for a certain number of generations, while other tasks might be queued and processed more slowly.
• Availability: The service won’t be available to the UK and EU at launch, which might be due to legal, regulatory, or data privacy considerations (such as GDPR). This limitation could be lifted in the future as they expand to more regions.

OpenAI Sora Features

Separate Product

• Sora is a standalone product, not integrated into ChatGPT or other OpenAI platforms.
• Accessible via Sora.com, where recently generated and curated videos are displayed.

Video Creation and Editing

• Generate videos from prompts: Users can create videos based on text prompts.
• Upload images: Users can also upload images, which Sora can use to generate videos.
• Re-mix feature: Allows users to make changes to existing videos by describing the desired alterations.
  • Strength setting: Controls how drastically the video will be altered, with higher settings leading to more artistic changes.
• Video Editing: Sora can also edit videos that were originally generated by the tool.

Image Upload & Enhancement

• Upload Images: You can start by uploading an image to create a video. This image can serve as the base, and you can extend it with further elements, text, or animation.
• Text Description: You can also describe the image with text. The more detailed your description, the more specific the video creation will follow your instructions. For less detailed descriptions, the tool will fill in the gaps with general creativity and detail.

Themes (Presets)

• SORA provides various presets that can be used to define the overall theme of the video. Some examples include:
  • Balloon World: This preset might create a whimsical or dreamlike atmosphere.
  • Stop Motion: A preset designed to emulate the stop-motion animation style, giving your video a frame-by-frame, hand-crafted look.

Aspect Ratio Selection

• You can choose the aspect ratio for your video. Some common options include:
  • 16:9 (Wide Screen): Ideal for most videos, particularly for YouTube, widescreen movies, etc.
  • 1:1 (Square): Suitable for social media posts like Instagram.
  • 9:16 (Vertical): Perfect for platforms like TikTok or Instagram Stories.

Video Duration

• You can set the duration of your video to be up to 20 seconds, giving you flexibility in how much content is included.

Text & Image Integration

• The platform allows the combination of both text and images for creative expression:
  • Create by Uploading Images: You upload an image to serve as the foundation for your video, then extend or animate it with additional content.
  • Text-based Creation: You can describe scenes or images using text. The more specific the text, the more the video follows your direction. For example, a detailed description will guide the video to replicate the exact elements you mention.

Storyboard (Advanced Creation)

• For more complex video projects, Storyboard mode allows you to direct the video creation along a timeline. This provides:
  • Control Over Sequence: You can define the order of elements (text, images, and videos).
  • Advanced Editing: It allows for more precise adjustments and sequencing of scenes.
  • Multimedia Integration: You can combine images, text, and video clips to create a narrative or complex visual story.

Video Quality and Resolution

• Resolution options: Generates videos up to 1080p resolution.
  • 1080p footage takes 8x longer to generate compared to 480p, which is the fastest option.
  • 720p takes 4x longer than 480p.
  • 480p is the fastest.
• Average generation time: A couple of minutes for a 1080p video (subject to user demand and traffic).

In a nutshell,

SORA is a flexible, user-friendly video creation platform with powerful customization options. You can:

• Upload images or describe scenes with text.
• Choose from various theme presets like Balloon World or Stop Motion.
• Control aspect ratio and video duration.
• Use Storyboard mode for advanced video editing and sequencing.

This combination of features makes it easy for users to create engaging, professional-looking videos, even with minimal technical knowledge.

These features outline Sora as a powerful but still-imperfect tool for generating creative video content, particularly for non-photorealistic, stylized projects.

Sora’s Technical Foundations

Sora is fundamentally built on the diffusion model, a technique that begins with random noise and iteratively refines it into a coherent video. This process mirrors how traditional image-to-image diffusion models work, but with the added complexity of video sequences.

The key to Sora’s innovation is the use of patch-based representation for both images and videos. Similar to tokens in GPT, videos and images in Sora are broken down into smaller “patches” of data. This enables the model to process large and complex visual data more efficiently, making it capable of generating videos across various durations and resolutions.

Moreover, Sora builds on the recaptioning technique used in DALL·E 3, allowing it to generate highly descriptive captions for its training data. This ability enables the model to closely follow textual prompts, resulting in videos that are faithful to user instructions and more aligned with the input description.

Also read: What is OpenAI’s Sora Diffusion Transformer (DiT)?

Ethical Considerations by OpenAI Sora

Here’s what Sora expect you to do:

1. Consent: Only upload media featuring people with their explicit permission, and ensure those under 18 have appropriate consent.
2. Violence and Explicit Themes: Do not upload content that depicts violence, explicit themes, or adult material.
3. Rights to Media: Ensure you have the necessary ownership or rights to upload the media you share.
4. Consequences: Misusing the platform by violating these rules may result in account suspension or banning without a refund.

Key Takeaways

OpenAI’s Sora is a text-to-video generator with features like themes, storyboard mode, and resolutions up to 1080p. However, it has notable limitations. Videos are capped at 20 seconds, which may not suit longer narratives. High-resolution rendering (e.g., 1080p) is time-intensive, slowing generation significantly compared to lower resolutions. Currently, Sora is unavailable in the UK/EU due to regulatory issues, limiting access. Additionally, ethical guidelines restrict usage, and violation risks account suspension. Sora is powerful but still evolving, with room for technical and accessibility improvements. Also, the speed of generation is the quite slow, and it is due to the high resolution videos. But I am hoping it will improve over time as OpenAI continues to optimize the model and its underlying infrastructure. Future updates may bring faster generation speeds without compromising the quality of high-resolution videos, making the process more efficient and user-friendly.

Conclusion

Sora’s final release is a remarkable milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence, combining the latest advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision, and deep learning to generate high-quality, short-form videos directly from text prompts. The potential implications of this technology are far-reaching, from creative industries to education, marketing, and beyond.

OpenAI’s vision for the model is far-reaching, with the ultimate goal of creating systems that can simulate the real world, bringing us one step closer to the realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As Sora evolves, its capabilities will likely expand, incorporating more advanced features like real-time video generation, interactive storytelling, and even integration with virtual and augmented reality.

Did you try it? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below!

Hi, I am Pankaj Singh Negi – Senior Content Editor | Passionate about storytelling and crafting compelling narratives that transform ideas into impactful content. I love reading about technology revolutionizing our lifestyle.