The com­pa­ny behind it is an applied AI research com­pa­ny focused on mak­ing con­tent cre­ation more acces­si­ble. They were even involved in the ear­ly devel­op­ment of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion, which is a pop­u­lar mod­el for cre­at­ing images from text. Peo­ple have used Runway's tools in movies like Every­thing Every­where All at Once, music videos, and TV shows. The plat­form works online, which means it uses cloud servers to do the heavy pro­cess­ing, so you don't need a super pow­er­ful com­put­er to use it.

One of the main things peo­ple use Run­way for is its video gen­er­a­tion. This is split into a few key func­tions. The most talked-about one is Gen‑2, which is their text-to-video mod­el. You write a descrip­tion of a scene, and the AI cre­ates a short video clip based on that text. For exam­ple, you could type "a gold­en retriev­er play­ing in a sun­ny park dur­ing spring," and it will gen­er­ate that scene for you. The more detail you add to your text prompt, the more spe­cif­ic the result will be. These gen­er­at­ed clips are usu­al­ly a few sec­onds long, but you can extend them in four-sec­ond incre­ments up to a max­i­mum of 16 sec­onds. Keep in mind that extend­ing a clip mul­ti­ple times can some­times make the video a bit strange or incon­sis­tent.

Here’s how you actu­al­ly use the text-to-video fea­ture:
1. First, you sign up for an account on the Run­way web­site. They have a free plan that gives you a cer­tain num­ber of cred­its to start with.
2. Once you're logged in, you'll see a dash­board with dif­fer­ent tools. You select the Gen‑2 Text to Video option.
3. You type your prompt into the text box. It's bet­ter to be direct and clear. Instead of a com­plex sen­tence, use sim­ple lan­guage that describes the sub­ject, the set­ting, and maybe the style, like "cin­e­mat­ic action" or "film noir."
4. Before gen­er­at­ing the full video, you can get a "Free Pre­view," which shows you a few still images based on your prompt. You pick the one that looks clos­est to what you want.
5. Then you click "Gen­er­ate." The plat­form process­es your request, which can take some time, and then your video clip appears.

Anoth­er major fea­ture is Gen‑1, which is a video-to-video tool. This one is dif­fer­ent because you start with an exist­ing video. You upload your own footage, and then you can apply a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent style to it using either a text prompt or a ref­er­ence image. For instance, you could upload a video of some­one walk­ing down a city street, pro­vide a ref­er­ence image of a clay­ma­tion char­ac­ter, and Gen‑1 will try to remake your video in that clay­ma­tion style. When you do this, you have set­tings you can adjust. "Style weight" con­trols how strong­ly the new style is applied, and "struc­tur­al con­sis­ten­cy" tells the AI how close­ly to stick to the shapes and motion of the orig­i­nal video.

Then there's the Image to Video func­tion. You upload a sta­t­ic image, and the AI brings it to life by adding motion. You have tools like the Motion Brush, which lets you "paint" over a spe­cif­ic area of the image and tell the AI how that area should move. You can spec­i­fy direc­tions like up, down, left, or right, or add more sub­tle ambi­ent motion. This is use­ful for mak­ing things like clouds drift across the sky or mak­ing a person's hair move slight­ly in the wind. You can also con­trol the cam­era motion, mak­ing it pan, tilt, or zoom in on the image.

Beyond video gen­er­a­tion, Run­way has a suite of over 30 oth­er tools they call "AI Mag­ic Tools." These are for more spe­cif­ic edit­ing tasks. Some of the most com­mon ones include:
* Green Screen: This tool auto­mat­i­cal­ly removes the back­ground from a video with­out you need­ing an actu­al green screen. You just upload your video, and the AI iden­ti­fies the sub­ject and cuts them out. You can then place a new back­ground behind them.
* Inpaint­ing: This lets you remove unwant­ed objects from your videos. You just draw a mask over the object you want to get rid of, and the AI fills in the back­ground.
* Infi­nite Image: With this tool, you can extend the bor­ders of an image. The AI gen­er­ates new con­tent beyond the orig­i­nal frame, pre­dict­ing what the sur­round­ing area would look like.
* Text to Image: Sim­i­lar to oth­er AI art gen­er­a­tors, you can type a text prompt to cre­ate still images. This is use­ful for cre­at­ing assets or con­cept art that you might lat­er want to ani­mate using the Image to Video fea­ture.
* Audio Tools: There are also tools for audio, like auto­mat­i­cal­ly tran­scrib­ing speech from a video into text or clean­ing up back­ground noise from an audio track.

Peo­ple from many dif­fer­ent fields use Run­way. Film­mak­ers and VFX artists use it to quick­ly cre­ate visu­al effects that would have tak­en days before. For exam­ple, the team behind Every­thing Every­where All at Once used Runway's tools dur­ing their post-pro­­duc­­tion process. Social media mar­keters use it to cre­ate eye-catch­ing video ads quick­ly with­out need­ing deep edit­ing skills. Artists and design­ers use it to exper­i­ment with new visu­al styles and cre­ate unique ani­ma­tions.

But it's not a per­fect sys­tem, and it's good to know the real­i­ty of using it. The plat­form oper­ates on a cred­it-based sys­tem. You get a cer­tain amount of cred­its with a free or paid plan, and every time you gen­er­ate a video or use a tool, it con­sumes cred­its. Gen­er­at­ing a 10-sec­ond video on some plans can take a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time, some­times up to 20 min­utes, and you often have to wait for one gen­er­a­tion to fin­ish before start­ing anoth­er.

The qual­i­ty of the out­put can be incon­sis­tent. Some­times the AI gets your prompt wrong or pro­duces a result that looks weird and dis­tort­ed. This means you can waste cred­its on failed gen­er­a­tions. There are also user com­plaints about the plat­form being over­ly sen­si­tive with its con­tent fil­ters, some­times block­ing prompts that don't seem prob­lem­at­ic. Some users find the pric­ing to be high for the qual­i­ty of the out­put you get, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to oth­er emerg­ing AI video tools.

The user inter­face itself is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered easy to use. It's designed to be approach­able for peo­ple who aren't tech experts, with clear menus and straight­for­ward con­trols. You upload your media, select the tool you want, adjust some sim­ple slid­ers and set­tings, and then gen­er­ate. This no-code approach is a big rea­son why it has become pop­u­lar among cre­ators who want to exper­i­ment with AI with­out need­ing a tech­ni­cal back­ground. You can also train your own cus­tom AI mod­els on the plat­form if you have spe­cif­ic data, which is a more advanced fea­ture for users who need the AI to rec­og­nize a par­tic­u­lar style or object con­sis­tent­ly.