Runway Gen-4.5 Powers Video Lab Now

April 23, 2026

Video Lab now generates every clip through Runway Gen-4.5. You give it a prompt (or a still image), and you get back a crisp 2–10 second scene in the aspect ratio you asked for. No queue waits, sharper output than the old local renderer, and prompt-rewriting still happens on your own machine so you can iterate without burning a render.

What you can do

• Text-to-video — "Aerial drone shot slowly descending over a misty pine forest at dawn, cinematic, shallow depth of field" comes back in about a minute.
• Animate a still image — pass an input image to bring it to life. Pass a second one for the final frame and Runway animates between them.
• Pick aspect ratio — landscape, portrait, square, ultrawide, or a Runway-supported custom ratio.
• Quality vs. speed — there's a higher-quality mode and a faster, cheaper one. The faster one is the right default while you're iterating on prompts.
• Stamp a watermark during generation — text or image, with five placement options.
• Layer audio afterwards — Runway clips are silent by design. The video editor's mix step overlays narration, music, and SFX onto the finished video.

When you'd reach for it

• You've got a product shot and need a 6-second loop for a landing page. Animate the still, drop a watermark on it, mix in your brand music, done.
• You're making a 40-second founder narration piece. Generate the voiceover, generate a music bed, mix them, render four or five Runway scenes to match the beats, and concat. No queueing, no per-clip upscaling dance.

Try it

• "Make a 7-second portrait clip of a neon rain-slicked Tokyo alley, cinematic."
• "Animate this photo into an 8-second clip with a slow push-in, then add my logo bottom-right."
• "Rewrite this prompt for video: 'a dog running'."
• "Generate a 6-second landscape product shot with a 'DRAFT' watermark bottom-right."

Heads up

• Audio is no longer baked in. Every clip comes back silent — plan for a mix step whenever you want sound.
• Pricing changed. Video Lab is a paid tool now. The old "free while on the local GPU" arrangement is over; see the Tools page for the current cost.
• Some operations from the old LTX-based Video Lab aren't ported yet. Things like retake, extend, upscale, and identity-preserving generation return a clear "temporarily unavailable" message with guidance on how to reproduce the same outcome with the operations that are live.
• Aspect ratios are now Runway presets. Arbitrary width/height pairs are gone — pick one of the named presets or a Runway-valid custom ratio.