Runway has emerged as a top-tier AI video generation tool, praised for its remarkable speed and its ability to maintain object consistency during generation. Alongside video generation, it offers tools for background removal, face blurring, text-to-video, and image-to-video. Recently, it made headlines by partnering with major Hollywood studios, cementing its status in the professional moviemaking space.
Hollywood’s embrace of Runway AI
Runway’s groundbreaking collaboration with Lionsgate marked a pivotal moment, enabling the company to train its models on the studio’s rich film and TV archives. Shortly after, AMC Networks became the first major cable entertainment company to utilize AI tools in the creation of marketing images and pre-visualization of TV content that hasn't yet entered the production phase.
What makes Runway so popular?
Video professionals admire Runway for its speed and its user-friendly interface, making it a powerful platform for both professional and casual users. Its AI video generation speed is perceived as an industry standard, with a capacity of over 500 videos per day on an unlimited plan. At the same time, it does good results at keeping objects as they are, without too much morphing. In the end, it possesses the ability to create a video-to-video generation where you can add clips up to 40 seconds in length, which is highly favorable when defining creative guidelines for the project. However, using Runway at its full capacity is quite expensive, which is why it's beneficial to know the best alternatives for video professionals.
Best Runway alternatives
Here are five tools that offer compelling features, pricing, and performance for creators and video teams.
Pika Labs is rising in AI video generation. It is known for its speed and simplicity, and high-quality output. At the same time it provides video professionals with reasonable pricing plans. On the contrary, it gives narrow style choices, up to 10-second 1080p video generations and fewer customization options. When in doubt, you can find a lot of helping tricks and general support on Discord channels.
Luma AI is an AI video generator focused on creating high-fidelity 3D environments and objects from images. As a powerful tool for creators and designers, Luma AI provides great help in making AI avatars, while its easy to learn approach greatly supports its adoption within video professionals.
It would be impossible not to mention Sora AI video generator by OpenAI as one of the best Runway alternatives for video professionals. It’s able to create realistic and imaginative videos from text prompts in stunning visual quality, allowing creative freedom within trustbuilding of generating realistic animations. Sora is definitely evolving technology, using all the might of OpenAI infrastructure and the best GPUs available, at the same time requiring detailed prompts and technical expertise with intention to charm video professionals as its main users. However, max resolution (1080p) restricts video length to under 20 seconds.
Pixverse is an AI video generator that specializes in creating photorealistic videos from still images. It can be a one of the good Runway alternatives for video professionals on a limited resources as it provides extreme versatility in creative process while maintaining videos in high-quality, plus offering advanced tools. It appears demanding on getting the firsthand whereabouts, and it’s definitely more expensive than Pika Labs solution.
Fliki is a unique platform that specializes in turning text into videos with AI voices, which immediately resonates as a great option for creating quick and engaging videos for ideation or brainstorming. With its simplified interface, and affordable pricing plans, it becomes a great tool for repurposing written content (IP) and stands out as one of the Runway alternatives for video professionals with a couple of concerns. On a negative side, it gives limited video editing features.
Pro tips: Pairing with an AI video enhancer
Most AI video generators still cap output at 1080p, with shorter duration limits. Why? It boils down to GPU infrastructure costs at the moment largely controlled by a single supplier making scalability expensive, making AI video enhancers become a worthy ally inside professional workflows. This is where TensorPix stands out with its latest advancements in developing the most powerful upscale model, delivering unmatched clarity and consistency in video enhancement and simplicity to use.
Once you log in, you will find an intuitive, step-by-step interface designed to simplify the video enhancement process.
- Select the Video Enhance option as your preferred AI upscaling method.
- Upload one or multiple videos, regardless of their length or format
- In the main toolbar, you will find various AI filters. Select Upscale Ultra 4.
For more complex video problems, you can learn more about Deep Clean Ultra 4 filter to further reduce noise, compression artifacts, and blur.
- Preview the results for free to assess quality before finalizing enhancements.
- Customize output settings by selecting resolution (2K, 4K), codecs (H264, H265/HEVC or ProRes), and file formats in Advanced settings.
- Select the output video extension and download the enhanced video.
You will receive an email notification once the enhancement is complete.
