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What is Runway?

Posted
Updated
ByChris Gaskins

Runway (also known as RunwayML) is a leading AI research company and creative platform that specializes in generative video and multimodal AI tools.1

While tools like ChatGPT focus on text, Runway is essentially the “Photoshop of the AI Video era.” It provides a suite of over 30 “Magic Tools” designed for filmmakers, artists, and marketing teams to generate, edit, and manipulate video content using artificial intelligence.2

Core Video Generation Models

Runway is most famous for its proprietary “Gen” series of models, which have evolved rapidly:3

  • Gen-4.5 & Gen-4 (Latest): These are the current industry-leading models.4 They can generate highly consistent characters, objects, and environments across multiple scenes.5 Gen-4.5 is particularly noted for its physics-aware realism and long-form video capabilities.
  • Gen-3 Alpha: A major leap that introduced near-photorealistic video generation, focusing on high fidelity, smooth motion, and complex lighting.6
  • Gen-2 & Gen-1: The foundational models that first popularized Text-to-Video (generating a clip from a prompt) and Video-to-Video (applying a new style to an existing video, like turning a home movie into a claymation).

Key “Magic Tools” and Features

Runway operates in a browser-based “studio” where users can access specific AI-powered functions:7

  1. Text-to-Video / Image-to-Video: Create a high-quality video clip simply by typing a description or uploading a static photo.8
  2. Motion Brush: A popular tool that lets you “paint” over a specific part of a still image to tell the AI exactly which part should move (e.g., making only the water in a photo flow).9
  3. Inpainting: Automatically remove people or objects from a video and have the AI fill in the background seamlessly.10
  4. Generative Audio & Lip Sync: Sync an AI-generated voice or your own audio to a character’s mouth movements in a video.11
  5. Multi-Scene Continuity: Tools that help maintain the same character or art style across different generated clips—a “holy grail” for AI filmmaking.12

Impact and Use Cases

  • Professional Filmmaking: Runway was used for visual effects in the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once.13
  • Marketing & Advertising: Brands use it to create high-end commercials and product “B-roll” without the cost of a traditional film set.14
  • World Building: Runway recently introduced GWM-1 (General World Model), which aims to simulate entire physics-aware environments for use in robotics and virtual reality.15