Okay so I swapped in Sora for the animation stage of the pipeline and tested it today to see what would happen.
There's a lot more factors than visual quality when you're using something like this everyday and I have to say so far my review would be very mixed.
On the positive side:
1. It occasionally produces cool animation work From the images and direction I give it.
2. It goes up to 1080p which should be useful, see negative side.
3. The subscription includes a blanket access solution to multiple powerful tools that I can make good use of.
On the negative side:
1. In a lot of ways this is kind of overhyped garbage.
2. Useful results are pretty far and few between, but can occasionally surpass all previous models.
3. Interface is really bad for serious work on longer form content. It's fairly ideal for people that have written a 10 second film. In example every file has to be downloaded one at a time. For comparison the system I currently use will do about 500 at once. It's missing a lot of features other platforms have.
4. Credits are outlandishly expensive in comparison to their actual overhead, I'd be surprised if it's costing them $0.05 for a 1080p 10 second generation, but a $20 monthly subscription will only get you two of those. I ran about 200 animations in 720p last week on my local computer with a 4090, And that ran about $2. I'm sure their compute is between two and 4 times what mine is, But regardless it does not cost$10 to produce 1 1080p video clip. What's happening is that there was an investment rush at the beginning and they received $150 billion in Valuation, And promised shareholders a strong return on their investment. Right now they're making about $300 million a month, And they are so top heavy with early investment that the entire company will collapse if they can't triple that. So now it's time for us consumers to pay back that $150 billion loan 1 video at the time. Imagine if I was standing next to a washing machine and you asked me how much to rent the machine for a day and I told you it was $10,000 in overhead so I needed 12. Now imagine you found out that it cost $10 to run the washing machine that the washing machine itself cost $1000 and that I was paying myself a quarter million dollars a year to stand next to the washing machine and figuring that in the "overhead cost". If you use that insane logic then it kind of makes sense, Since you are only scraping by on the profit margins at 12 grand a day.
I bought the pro plan to research how useful or worthwhile it was, And was stopped from using my "unlimited" generations after about 20 short videos most of which were five seconds. In my current system I'm producing around two to 300 10 second videos per day with about 30% being useful. Sora stopped me from using my unlimited plan after 20 videos and told me to wait for "a while". It's too early to tell a lot of things, But if a while means a day like it does on other similar platforms, This is nearly useless to me. Keep in mind that not even all of the great shots actually end up in a film and it's a matter of what works in the edit, So let's say I bumped that up to 1080p and it's giving me 10 videos a day, I'm looking at three usable videos maybe one of which fits into the edit timeline in a way that tells the story. So to make a standard feature film you would have to check in all day and push the system to its limits in order to make a single feature film, And that's at $2400 a year. Honestly it's not the worst deal in the world if you were desperate to make a film and had two years 7 days a week to do it, But I'm really hoping that what I'm seeing right now is a growing pains thing and that we'll be getting far better service in the future. Unless Sora's offerings and competence change dramatically over the next month, I'll still be using my current system which is a dozen times cheaper in both time and money spent per minute of film produced.
In short it does some really cool things sometimes and is somewhat of a step forward, But simultaneously it's a step backwards in a lot of other ways and for that reason is much less useful than I had hoped. I paid for the month and this is day one, so I'll continue to use it for all the time I paid for and give a more nuanced review in a month.
