Runway AI brings precise camera controls to videos in impressive industry-leading update

As artificial intelligence gets cleverer every day, media artificial intelligence company Runway has added a game changing new feature to its Gen-3 Alpha AI image generator, giving content creators more control over their AI videos.

The company announced on X (formerly Twitter) that it's rolling out its powerful Advanced Camera Control on Gen-3 Alpha Turbo.

The new feature expands on the model’s existing capabilities, and now users can “move horizontally while panning to arc around subjects… Or, move horizontally while panning to explore locations,” according to Runway.

The user can preserve the AI integrity of the character forms and settings behind them, putting viewers in a fully formed and seemingly 3D world, like a camera on a movie set. It is way ahead of previous attempts at this function by competitors that often deformed the subjects, or reduced them to 2D.

There are six movement direction options, and multiple ways of manipulating the movement of the camera using text prompts.

Users can also customize the direction and intensity of the camera movements to their own style, “for even more intention in every shot,” while combining “outputs with various camera moves and speed ramps for interesting loops.”

This feature will prove useful for creators wanting to generate visually engaging loops or transitions, providing an added layer of depth for more compelling videos.

The new and frankly impressive feature is only available on Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, so you’ll need to subscribe to the $12 (around £9 / AU$18) per month standard subscription plan to access the model and try it for yourself.

Runway has been around since 2018 and it debuted Gen-3 Alpha in June, calling it “a new frontier for video generation”.

Trained equally on videos and images, Gen-3 Alpha powers Runway’s text-to-video, image-to-video and text-to-image tools. The system is capable of generating photorealistic depictions of humans, made clear from the social media post, and enabling individuals to create content in a wide variety of artistic styles.

In September Runway introduced its video-to-video generation, enabling users to impressively transform the visual style of a given video clip using text prompts.

Runway said:

“Training Gen-3 Alpha was a collaborative effort from a cross-disciplinary team of research scientists, engineers, and artists. It was designed to interpret a wide range of styles and cinematic terminology.”

Take a look at our guides to the best AI image generators.