An open character named Claudia, an AI-made pop singer with a black bob and clay-orange streak, fronts ten music videos made with Claude between September and November 2026. The release publishes every image of her, the films, and everything needed to recreate her yourself. The videos were built with Midjourney prompts, Seedance 2.5 clips and Suno v6 songs.
A developer has launched a Show HN tool that turns any website, article or script into a Rick and Morty-style explainer video with dialogues, scenes and action. Users click generate to convert the script into a reviewable storyboard, then generate again for the final video, which is paid because it uses AI video under the hood.
AxiomStory is a new AI story studio that reads every chapter of a manuscript and flags continuity errors, such as a character's eye color changing between chapters. It builds a wiki page for each character and place, and reuses one approved look and voice per character across generated pictures and video. The free plan offers about 30,000 words of AI help; paid tiers run from $16 to $160 per month.
MiniMax's H3 family expanded beyond video this week, with H3 Image, H3 Image Highspeed, H3 Highspeed, and H3 Lite now available in Recraft Studio. The two image models generate and edit at 2K or 4K, while the two video models produce 4–15 second clips at 480p or 768p with sound. H3 Image starts at 6 credits per image and H3 Lite at 4 credits per second of video.
Adobe announced experimental AI tools at its annual Max conference, including Project Screen Test for directing AI characters through conversation, Project Sight Span for turning flat images into navigable 3D scenes, and Project Sound Bender for mixing sound effects on a square sound canvas. Project Rinse Repeat copies edits and applies them to other subjects in the same photo using native Photoshop tools. These "sneaks" are tech previews that may eventually reach Creative Cloud or Firefly, with no guarantee of launch.
MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models released PAN 2, a 29B-parameter open world model that takes a scene plus a text action and simulates the outcome as video, with weights, training code and inference code under Apache 2.0. It pairs an LLM planner that writes structured JSON world states with a 29B MMDiT diffusion transformer conditioned by a frozen Qwen3.5-9B encoder, and IFM reports 34.0% full-plan completion on 100 multi-step tasks, ahead of MiniMax-H3 at 32.50%, while trailing MiniMax-H3 on single actions and human preference (Elo 1595 vs 1620). IFM's ablation shows removing the LLM planner drops full-plan completion to 0.0% and step completion from 75.1% to 8.7%.
Gemini Omni Flash 1.2, Google's newest video model, is now available in Recraft Studio, where clips run up to 10 seconds with native audio. Compared with 1.1, it keeps characters, products and scenes steadier across a clip, follows camera directions with fewer unwanted cuts, and produces clearer lip-synced dialogue including scenes with several speakers. Google released the model on November 5, 2026, and notes it still struggles with fast sports action, rapid script changes and complex physics.
Google DeepMind rolled out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, now generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business, with native 15-second video generation, multi-turn conversational editing and stronger reference following. The price drops 30% from Gemini Omni 1.1 to $0.07 per second for 720p video, and users can draft at 360p or 720p before upscaling to 1080p or 4K. Clips can be set from 3 to 15 seconds in one-second increments, and outputs carry an imperceptible SynthID watermark.
Why it matters: Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash raises native clip length to 15 seconds and cuts the price 30% to $0.07 per second of 720p video, with multi-turn conversational editing now generally available.
Google DeepMind rolled out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash and made it generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business. The model generates and edits native clips up to 15 seconds, up from 10 seconds in Omni 1.1, supports multi-turn conversational editing, and holds character, product, and style references more consistently; 720p video now costs $0.07 per second, 30% less than Omni 1.1. Outputs carry a SynthID watermark, and the model is rolling out in Flow, Google Vids, the Gemini app, and Google Ads.
Why it matters: Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash cuts the price 30% to $0.07 per second for 720p video while extending native clips to 15 seconds, giving teams producing video at scale a cheaper option to compare against prior versions.
A viral claim that 55% of China's AI tokens go to short dramas and video generation — traced to a June investor call by COL Group — has drawn rebuttals from ByteDance, which says video generation is only about 10% of its own compute, and from People's Daily. Over 90% of the roughly 430,000 micro-dramas released in the first eight months of 2026 were AI productions, and a five-second 720p clip on ByteDance's Seedance costs around 100,000 tokens.
Modal explains how to run LiveKit Agents with open-weights or custom models on its serverless GPUs, using BitHuman's open-weights Expression Video Avatar voiced by Qwen3-TTS to clone Charles Frye. The setup exposes the avatar container's /launch endpoint via a Modal Server and uses Sticky Sessions to keep WebSocket clients on the same container, with GPU snapshots hiding cold starts.
Descript's October 12, 2026 release adds a search bar across your entire drive, with a full results page and Underlord file-finding. Enterprise drives can now send async recording requests so guests record on their own schedule, and AI Speech moves to ElevenLabs v4 for more accurate voice clones. Paid plans also default to MiniMax H3 Max Turbo for AI video generation.
Creative studio Afterimage tested GPT-6 Astra on footage from real shoots to see whether its Blender 3D skills carried over to visual effects work. Astra handled tasks ranging from replacing a dish in a moving pan to adding a building to a Brooklyn street and making a giant parade float appear outside a window in handheld iPhone footage. Some shots worked and others didn't, but the team ended up dreaming up effects they'd never have attempted before.
Descript's September 17, 2026 release adds 18 caption presets and 10 new text animations, plus AI-generated background music and sound effects placed directly on the timeline in version 145.0.15 or newer. Checkout now displays prices in local currency with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App and other options, and the voice picker draws on the ElevenLabs voice library.
MiniMax launched H3, a general-purpose multimodal generation model that understands text, images, video and audio as a unified context and generates video with native stereo sound up to 15 seconds at 2K resolution. The company says 2K output costs less than a third of mainstream models per second, and it plans to open the model weights in the coming days subject to applicable laws and regulations. H3 is built on Contextual Omni Representation, H3-VAE, H3-Omni Transformer and In-Context Regeneration, and MiniMax says a full technical report is coming soon.
Why it matters: MiniMax's H3 unifies text, image, video and audio generation in one model and claims 2K pricing below a third of mainstream models, with weights promised soon.
Runway is partnering with Modal to power real-time inference for Runway Characters, a real-time video agent API built on Runway's GWM-1 world model that generates expressive digital personas from a single image with zero fine-tuning. Modal's serverless platform let Runway move from proof of concept to production in under 30 days, using single-line multi-node GPU clusters with RDMA networking across every region. Characters is available now to developers and businesses at dev.runwayml.com and to consumers at runwayml.com.
OpenAI updated its Sora 2 prompting guide to cover new API capabilities: reusable character references for objects and animals, 1920×1080 and 1080×1920 exports, a maximum clip length raised from 12s to 20s, video extension that uses the full original clip as context, and a Batch API for asynchronous video jobs. The guide also walks through prompt structure for shot framing, camera motion, lighting and dialogue, and notes that resolution, duration and character IDs must be set as API parameters rather than described in prose. Extensions of up to 20 seconds are supported, and a video can be extended up to 6 times for a total of 120s.
Why it matters: OpenAI's updated Sora 2 prompting guide details new API capabilities such as character references, 20s clips and video extension, plus reusable prompt templates for controlling shots.
Lemon Slice built Lemon Slice Live, a product for real-time video conversations with AI characters, using Modal and Daily's low-latency primitives to reach an end-to-end video response latency of 3-6 seconds. The pipeline runs a Pipecat server and a 1B parameter video model on separate Modal containers that communicate via Modal's Tunnel and are co-located with region selection, with Deepgram, Grok and ElevenLabs handling speech-to-text, LLM response and text-to-speech. Earlier, two Python Modal Functions let Lemon Slice scale to 10,000 requests per hour without managing an ECS cluster, job queue or load balancer.
sync. is using Modal to lipsync over 100 hours of video a day, splitting long videos into scenes that run face detection and translation across n T4 GPU containers before passing each scene to its proprietary LipSync GenAI model on A100s. The team deploys up to 95 times a day and shipped 10 major model variants to production in one year, after moving off a Google Colab prototype and AWS Lambda.