Runway’s New AI Video Model Promises Character Consistency
AI video company Runway has released a powerful new model that claims to generate consistent characters and realistic physics.
Runway Gen-4 has already started rolling out to customers and it has shared examples that do look like a step forward on previous models.
One of the major features Runway touts is consistent characters, locations, and objects in different “camera” shots. The ability to maintain “coherent world environments”, as Runway puts it, has been a major sticking point for AI video generators which produces material that fails to suspend the viewer’s disbelief.
“Gen-4 can utilize visual references, combined with instructions, to create new images and videos utilizing consistent styles, subjects, locations, and more,” Runway writes in a blog post. “All without the need for fine-tuning or additional training.”
Gen-4 also has an impressive-looking “image to video” feature in which the user can upload a picture and bring it to life. The video editor types a prompt telling Gen-4 how to animate the still picture; giving specific instructions on how the character should act or behave.
“Gen-4 excels in its ability to generate highly dynamic videos with realistic motion as well as subject, object, and style consistency with superior prompt adherence and best-in-class world understanding,” the company says. “Runway Gen-4 [also] represents a significant milestone in the ability of visual generative models to simulate real-world physics.”
Today we're introducing Gen-4, our new series of state-of-the-art AI models for media generation and world consistency. Gen-4 is a significant step forward for fidelity, dynamic motion and controllability in generative media.
Gen-4 Image-to-Video is rolling out today to all paid… pic.twitter.com/VKnY5pWC8X
— Runway (@runwayml) March 31, 2025
The keyword Runway is using is “consistency.” If the company can achieve that, then “you can start to tell longer form narrative content with actual continuity,” says Head of Runway Studio Jamie Umpherson.
That’s significant because Runway very much has its sights set on Hollywood. Last year, it signed a deal with Lionsgate, a major movie distributor, so it could train on its extensive catalog.
Tech Crunch reports that Runway refuses to reveal the exact training data fed into Gen-4. The company was caught scraping hundreds of YouTube videos for its last previous model, Gen-3, and is facing a lawsuit by a group of artists who accuse it of copyright theft.
Runway have released a raft of films made by Gen-4, they are available on Runway’s YouTube channel.
