How To Use Sora (OpenAI Sora Tutorial) - Sora Beginners Guide

So in this online tutorial, I'm going to show you guys how you can actually get started with the Sora, even as a complete beginner. So let's not waste any time. Once you've signed up to Sora and you have access to the website Sora.com and once you've completed your onboarding process, you'll be presented with this website. Now, once on this website, you can see that instantly we have this at the bottom of the screen. This is where we can instantly start to prompt with whatever kind of video that we want to make. So let's say, for example, we wanted to make a video about a cat riding a skateboard, like the one that we already have here. We can put in a cat riding a skateboard in the sn snow. So let's just do that. Cat riding a skateboard in the snow. And then what we can do is change these settings right here. So right here, if we want to add a driving image, we can upload an image from a website like Midjourney or any other AI image generator if we want to guide where the footage goes. Of course, if we don't want to do that, we wouldn't add an image right there. If we want to use a preset, for example, we can click this and then you can see the kinds of presets that are already there. These presets are essentially things that are artistic styles. So, for example, if you want it to be a stop motion style, it's going to look like that. If you want it to look like film noir, it's going to look like that. And if you want it to look like any of these balloon world styles, that's essentially what you'd have it set as. This is where we actually take a look at how the styles will look when you generate the footage. The first one being stop motion, you can see it's very stop motion. Y the second one is, of course, papercraft. You can see that everything looks like it's made out of paper or cardboard, which is a really cool OpenAI actually revealed this sometime last year, I believe. Then, of course, you can see we have film noir. This is where it kind of looks black and white and has this moody aesthetic to it. This is something that you kind of see in the Batman style films. I think this one is really cool. Of course, we also have archival, which is where you have this weird sort of nostalgic sort of, you know, film. And this one is basically for those short films or maybe a flashback to a particular moment in time. Then of course we have Balloon World, which is pretty much just a quirky and fun one. And I don't think this one does have many use cases. I did test out Balloon World quite a few times and it didn't have the right consistency that I required. Very weird. Now, something that you can actually do with those specific film styles is that you can actually create your own. So you can click manage and then you can create any film style that you do want. So for example, you can see if you want to go and change the original presets. You can't of course change them, they're already set like themselves. But if you click Add, you can add your own preset, preset and this is where you would name it. So let's say I wanted one that was 3D animation style. I just type in 3D animation. And then of course you can see for my preset, this is where I describe the camera lighting, the film stock, the colors and the content transformation. Or I can even upload a reference image or video. And that's going to basically help you guys to drive the kind of content that outputs from Sora. So for example here, now, I would do this now, but currently, since I'm running this through a vpn, this thing is really glitchy and isn't working. But, but this is just where you'd put those specific details. And then anytime you want a specific type of footage, you just come here, use your preset, and then of course you'd be able to do that. Now you can see I've got my own 3D animation preset here. I'd be able to click this and then I'd be able to generate whatever kind of clip I wanted. Then of course you set your aspect ratio. For those of you who are doing short form content, of course you would set it to this form, the 9 to 16. Of course for long form, you'd want 16.9, which is the YouTube aspect ratio. And of course, if you're on like Instagram, you, you'd want the one to one, which is the square aspect ratio. Of course you can have the resolution. For this one, I'm going to have the resolution to be 480p, which is the fastest. However, if you do have it at 1080p, it's going to be eight times slower. Of course you can change the duration of the clip. The longer you put the duration, the longer it's going to take to render. And of course this is where you can select the variations. If it's something where you're really confused at what you're going to be creating. You would add up to four videos. But of course, with that being said, if you click full videos and then you calculate credits right here, you. You just want to hover over this because this will show you how much credits it's used. So, for example, if I go down to two videos, you can see it's going to calculate credits, and this will use 50 credits at current settings. The calculation for the credits is based on these combined factors, such as your resolution, the duration, and of course, the variations and aspect ratio. If you want to know how many credits you do have left, just click the top right and you'll see on the right, you'll see your plan followed by how many credits you have left for that month. So let's go ahead and generate our first clip, and then I'm going to click Enter. Once that's done, you can see it's been added to queue, and all I have to do now is simply wait for this to pop up. So now if I want to go ahead and view exactly what's happened, I just go over here to click all videos, and this is where you're going to see the clip rendering. So all I have to do now is just wait, and then eventually this clip will have rendered and be right here. In the meantime, of course, if you do want some inspiration, you can go to the feature tab and you can see what other people have created. For example, if I want to know how someone created this clip right here, and I found it super interesting, in fact, I actually find this Viking one really interesting, I can click this, then it's going to actually give me the prompt. And then of course, I can edit the prompt, resubmit it myself, and then of course, I can use all of these other things that I'll talk about in a moment. So now that the video is done and rendered, one thing that you can do, which is rather fascinating, is that you can use your cursor, and when going left to right, you can sort of control how quick these videos move. It's a way to control exactly certain points of your video in terms of the playback, and it allows you to see if the video is to your liking. Of course, you can click the video and then use your arrows on the keyboard to go left or to go right to shuffle between those video clips. You can see my cat here is doing something rather hilarious. And on this one, it seems a little bit more accurate. Now, of course, with these video generations, there's a lot of things that you can do. For example, edit, prompt, recut, remix, and blend. But I'm going to hand it over to OpenAI for this because this one clip that you're seeing right here literally just took an hour to generate. So they're going to show you guys how to use the other features as well.

Storyboard is our most advanced editing creation tool that gives you the control to direct actions in a sequence across a familiar timeline. You can reach it by clicking the Storyboard button in the composer. At the top of the storyboard, you'll see caption cards. This is where you'll describe the setting, characters, and action that you want to occur at a particular point in the clip. Below that lies a timeline where you can sequence your actions in time. Below are the same creation settings from the simple Composer. Let's start by setting our scene. I want a red crane with a yellow tail to stand in a stream. And then about halfway through, I want it to dip its head into the water. So I'll come down to my timeline and click to create a new storyboard card. About halfway through in this card, I'm just going to describe the next action. The crane dips its head. Perfect. Now, looking back at the timeline, you'll notice that there's space between my first card and my second card. That space is important to preserve because it gives Sora time to connect the first set of actions with the second set. Moving the cards too close together might make Sora create hard cuts in your clip, as it doesn't have the chance to smoothly combine these two scenes. Moving the cards too far away will make Sora have more time to imagine, and it might fill in more details than you want between these two. So it's really about finding the right pacing for your story to make the results as refined as possible. Review my settings. I actually want this to be landscape. Great. So I'll go ahead and create my video. And here's what the storyboard made. You can see my crane standing in the water, and then about halfway through, it dips its head in. In the lightbox, I can always review the exact cards from my storyboard, and I can see where I had placed them along the timeline. If I want, I can always revise the storyboard and create new videos. Tweaking the description and the storyboard cards, or the placement and sequencing of the actions. And that's how you Storyboard Blend is an experimental editing tool that allows you to transform and influence the contents of one video with that of another. It's kind of like smashing two videos together. And the results can be exhilarating. Here I have a close up of a monarch butterfly. When I saw this video, I noticed it's a bit still and it looks a tiny bit like an orchid. I thought I'd generate a few videos of orchids and blend them together to see what would happen. So I'll come down to blend and choose a video from my library. I can see a handful of blends and orchids, so I'll pick one of them. This will take me to the blend editor where I can see both my butterfly clip and my orchid clip side by side. I can also see that in the middle of both clips is a curve, which lets me know how strong the influence of each video is at a given point in time. The higher up the curve, the more influence the top clip will have. The lower down the curve, the more influence the bottom clip will have. If I scrub through the timeline, I can review exactly what both of my videos show. And I can also grab either handle to trim in or expand how much of each clip I want in this resulting blend. So let's go ahead and blend these two clips and see what we can get. And wow. Blend was able to seamlessly transform my butterfly. In the lightbox at the bottom, you can see each video that was used to create the blend. If I'm unhappy with this result or I want to try a different curve setting, I can always edit my blend and try again. Happy blending. Recut is one of the most powerful editing tools in Sora. And it lets me trim down and extend any segment of an existing video. We'd like to show you how it works. Sora has given me three distinct cuts of a robot on a remote hillside. Now, I really love this first second, but once it cuts into a close up, that's just not what I had in mind. So I'll use Recut to extend this first part into a new 5 second video. Recut has now taken my existing clip and imported it into a storyboard. I can see and playback my clip in the timeline. Or I can take this and trim my clip down to just the segment that I like. Perfect. Now here's the segment I want to extend and I'll leave the rest of the timeline empty to give Sora the ability to imagine the extension. So let's hit Create and see what it makes. Here is the result. Sora has now taken my one second of the video and seamlessly extended it into a new five second video. So instead of the three distinct cuts, I now have one continuous shot of my robot on a remote hillside where they've always belonged. Loop is an exciting new part of our editing suite that lets you seamlessly repeat any section of an existing video. I have a herd of sheep running across a foggy field in Ireland, so pastoral, and I want it to repeat forever. So we're going to do just that. Clicking loop will take me into the editor. At the bottom of the screen, I can see my video. And I can also see two handles that let me adjust the section of the video that we'll be looping. Dragging the handle on the right will adjust the end frame, and dragging the handle on the left will adjust the start frame. This looks pretty good. In this example, the first and last frame of my video are fairly similar, so the short loop should work great by default because Sora doesn't have to add too many frames to make it make sense. But if the first and last frame of the video are really different, it might be best to use normal or long loops to give Sora some extra time to connect those frames more seamlessly. For now, I'll use normal and it should work pretty well. Let's see how it goes. You can see that Sora took that middle section and created a perfect seamless loop of the sheep running across the field. That's really nice. We can't wait to see the endless cycles of aesthetics that you create. Remix is a powerful iteration tool that lets me use natural language to add, remove, or edit objects in an existing video. So here I have a wide shot of a brutalist home set along the coast. After seeing it, I'm curious what this would look like if it was a mid century home. So let me use Remix to achieve that. Clicking Remix opens the remix editor where I can simply describe the change that I want to see in the video. Replace the cement building with a mid century home, and that change is pretty significant. So using the remix strength strong makes a lot of sense here. If I wanted to maybe add a few trees, I could use Mild and it would preserve more of my original video. Now, if I wanted to do something even smaller, like maybe just remove the windows from my building, then I could use something subtle here. But for now, I'll keep it strong. We'll hit Remix and see how it does. And here's what it made. You can see that through remixing that video, I've maintained the camera motion and the setting. But it's replaced my brutalist structure with a mid century home on the coast. Et voila.