Video Gen · Model Guide · 4 min read
Sora (OpenAI)
OpenAI's text-to-video model — long, coherent, physically-plausible clips with dialogue and sound.
| Developer | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Availability | Cloud only |
| Commercial license | No local license applicable. Commercial use follows OpenAI's terms for your plan (enterprise/API terms differ from consumer); generated videos carry provenance metadata. Verify current terms before client work. |
Basic Information
Sora is OpenAI's flagship video generation model, available through the Sora app and API. It generates multi-second to minute-scale clips from text and image prompts, with synchronized audio, and made its name on physics-adjacent plausibility — objects persist, camera moves stay coherent, and characters hold identity across shots better than earlier generations of video models.
It is a hosted, metered product: subscriptions and API tiers priced by generation. Provenance metadata (C2PA) is attached to outputs, and commercial usage terms are tied to OpenAI's platform policies.
Best use cases
- Short-form social video and b-roll with sound, generated from text
- Iterative scene editing — extending, remixing, restyling existing clips
- Storyboarding and previz for production pipelines
- Marketing content where prompt-to-final-video speed matters more than pixel-perfect control
Computational Requirements
None — cloud only. Generation happens on OpenAI infrastructure; usage is credit- or subscription-metered.
- For locally-runnable video generation, see the Wan 2.2 guide — the current open-weights option.
Commercial license
No local license applicable. Commercial use follows OpenAI's terms for your plan (enterprise/API terms differ from consumer); generated videos carry provenance metadata. Verify current terms before client work.
Compare the cost of using it
Curious how a hosted model’s bills add up against local hardware? The Local vs Cloud panel does the math for your workload.
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