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Vol. 42 No. 2 — Mar/Apr 2025

Sora (openai.com/sora) requires the use of credits to create videos, and the number of credits can vary due to factors such as a video’s duration and resolution. For example, a 20-second, 720p video costs 540 credits. The Plus plan comes with 1,000 credits per month, and at the time of this writing, you cannot buy additional credits. Also, unused credits don’t roll over to the next month (help.openai.com/en/articles/10245774-sora-billing-credits-faq).

CREATING A VIDEO

Once you gain access to Sora, you’ll have the option to view featured and recent videos (see Figure 1 below). After studying the prompts that were entered for recent videos, I wanted to make my prompts as detailed as possible. I decided to create my first video based on my recent donation of a blanket to a local animal shelter. Why not encourage others to do the same? Since I was using a Google Doc to come up with prompts, I made use of the Help Me Write feature. I wrote the following for Sora:

Create a prompt for a video showing a couple sitting in their living room on a cold afternoon. It is lightly snowing outside. Their living room has a decorated Christmas tree and a fireplace. The wife uses her mobile phone to purchase a throw to donate to a local animal shelter. The print of the throw has canines printed on it. The wife is happy to be doing something good for a dog waiting to be adopted. The couple has a dog that is relaxing on a chair near the fireplace. The dog is napping and is comfortable. The purpose of the video is to encourage others to remember homeless animals during the holiday season and give.

This transformed into a refined prompt that I could copy and paste into Sora (see Figure 2). I pressed the arrow to create the video. Among other elements, I was disappointed with the unintelligible text shown in some of the frames of the video (see Figure 3), but at the bottom of the screen, there was an option to remix it. I chose that instead of starting over. I asked for these changes:

The video should show her purchasing a throw from an online retailer to donate to a local animal shelter. There should be no wording on the screen of the phone. The husband should have short, dark hair. There should be a message towards the end of the video to encourage people to donate to their local animal shelters.

In Figure 4, the video on the left ended up being closer to what I was looking for than the video on the right, although both still contained nonsense words. The video on the right interpreted my changes to include an image of the man on the screen of the device held by the woman, instead of the man sitting near the woman. In the video on the left, the blanket shown on the dog looks more like a dog sweater to me. I had asked for a dog relaxing in a chair near the fireplace, but the one shown is on the screen of the device the woman is holding. And neither video had adequate wording for the message I wanted to convey.

SHARING A VIDEO

While you can download the finished product as an MP4, I posted the link to my video on my X account to use its stats tool to measure content interaction. Currently, you can’t add music or subtitles to your video on Sora. However, you can get around this by uploading your video to YouTube. With YouTube, I added closed captions and a soundtrack called “Christmas Homecoming” (see Figure 5).

For now, if you choose to try Sora, I’d suggest using it to develop visual-only content rather than attempting to include wording anywhere in the video. Another hiccup occurred a few hours after I was testing Sora, when I was surprised to see an error message on my video and the note, “Sora is not available in your country yet” (see Figure 6). I guess OpenAI still has a few issues to work out with its new tool.