

The video generation is limited to 15-second clips, and like all generative AI, it isn’t perfect.The high degree of customization and broad set of editing tools, both AI-powered and otherwise, allows users a significant amount of flexibility in creating content.Runway offers the most extensive and advanced set of AI tools out of all the platforms we tested.


Runway is a video-editing platform that offers a full suite of AI tools, which they call their “ AI Magic Tools,” including the ability to generate video and images, train custom models to generate images based on existing data sets, erase backgrounds and objects, generate transcripts, and automatically detect scenes in longer videos to cut into shorter clips. We experienced some performance issues when uploading larger files that required us to restart the program.There isn’t a lot of flexibility in the templates and designs, and customization is limited largely to colors and fonts.The brand kit on the starter pricing level and above allows marketing and social teams to easily produce videos in line with their brand’s look and feel.It boasts an impressive set of AI-powered capabilities even without generative AI, or algorithms that can generate new content versus manipulating existing audio, video, or images. The AI-powered transcription, text-to-video editing features, and stock footage to keyword matching tools all worked as well or better than the same features on other software.Both features lessen the learning curve for users without video-editing experience to learn the platform. The menus and features are well-organized, attractive, and intuitive, and the tutorials are clear and easy to access. Lumen5 is the easiest to use among all the platforms we tested.Users can also upload their own images and footage to place in the video. It automatically summarizes longer texts and uses AI to create captions, match footage and images, and cut the script into scenes. Lumen5 is primarily a tool for turning text-such as a blog post, article, or research paper-into video.
