How do you make a video with Sora?

Sora, OpenAI's video generator, has been open to paying ChatGPT subscribers for eleven days. It doesn't live inside ChatGPT: it has its own website, sora.com, where you sign in with your ChatGPT account. The front page shows a feed of videos made by other users, and you can open any of them to see the prompt behind it, which is one of the best ways to learn what works.

Making a clip takes a few minutes. Making a good clip takes a little method: plan one shot, start cheap, and refine instead of starting over. This guide walks through a complete example.

Before you generate: the settings

Next to the prompt box are a few settings. Each choice affects both quality and cost.

Credits are Sora's unit of account. A 480p video costs between 20 and 150 credits depending on its length and options, a 720p video between 30 and 540, and a 1080p video between 100 and 2,000.

A worked example, step by step

Suppose a community garden wants a short, calm clip to open its spring newsletter video.

Step 1: write one shot. Describe a single scene: who or what is in it, what moves, where it happens, and how the camera sees it.

Morning in a small community garden. Dew on rows of lettuce and kale, a watering can resting on a wooden raised bed. A robin lands on the edge of the bed and hops once. The camera slowly pushes in at knee height. Soft, warm sunlight, light haze, gentle and peaceful.

Step 2: generate a cheap draft. Choose widescreen, 480p and 5 seconds. Watch the result closely for the usual flaws. In early testing, objects sometimes passed through each other or vanished, and animals' legs got confused when they walked, so a bird that hops once is a safer request than one that walks across the bed.

Step 3: refine with Remix. If the scene is right but one detail isn't, don't rewrite the whole prompt. Remix lets you describe a change, such as "make the light more golden and remove the watering can," and Sora generates a new version. A strength setting controls how far the new clip may drift from the original: low for small fixes, high for a freer reinterpretation.

Step 4: build a sequence with Storyboard. For more than one moment, open the Storyboard. It lets you set what should happen at different points in the clip, for example the robin landing at the start and a gardener's hands picking a lettuce near the end, and Sora joins them into one sequence. Keep each card short and consistent in style, light and setting, or the scenes won't match.

Step 5: finish and keep. Other tools adjust the result: Loop and Re-cut offer further ways to edit a clip and its scenes, and Blend combines two videos into a new one that keeps elements of both. When you're happy, render the final version at a higher resolution and save it. Saved videos can be organized into folders.

Step 6: check the safeguards. Every Sora video carries C2PA metadata, a label in the file identifying it as Sora-made, and by default a visible watermark in the lower-right corner. Sora refuses certain requests, such as images of public figures, recognizable characters or logos. And by default OpenAI may train on your new videos; you can turn this off under Settings, then Data controls.

What are the limits on each plan?

Sora is included in two ChatGPT plans, at no extra charge beyond the subscription. Each month you receive a set number of credits; they reset monthly, and unused credits don't carry over.

Priority videos are generated quickly; relaxed videos are low priority, so they take longer when many people are using Sora, as they were on launch day.

Some limits apply to everyone. Sora isn't part of ChatGPT Team, Enterprise or Edu, and it is closed to people under 18. It isn't available in the United Kingdom, Switzerland or the European Economic Area, and OpenAI warns that using it from unsupported regions can lead to account suspension. Uploading videos of real people is limited to a small group of testers for now. OpenAI has also said it is working on pricing tailored to different kinds of users, planned for early next year, so these allowances may change.