How AI startup Runway is trying to make content creation faster and easier, according to its cofounder

• The buzzy generative-AI startup Runway wants to revolutionize video creation and editing.
• Filmmakers and creators have been using the startup to make video editing more efficient.
• Runway cofounder Cristóbal Valenzuela shares how the platform is helping creators, and its vision.

All sorts of AI startups are cropping up with the promise of simplifying video creation and editing.

But Runway is one of the buzziest — it recently announced a $141 million funding round, and was valued at $1.5 billion. It’s also a favorite among VCs and creator-economy experts.

“We’re not investors, but this deal is at the top of my ‘I wish we had a fund then’ list when Runway was at an earlier stage,” Ben Mathews, general partner at the creator-focused fund Night Ventures, told Insider in January.

The idea for Runway came from the cofounders’ background at the intersection of art and technology, and the three have been building tools to integrate AI in filmmaking and video creation for seven years, long before AI became a hot topic in mainstream media.

Runway cofounder Cristóbal Valenzuela shared with Insider some of the top features the platform offers, how they’re developing, and the company’s vision for the future of filmmaking.

Valenzuela said Runway’s research focuses on making storytelling easier in two ways: helping to “see the world” with video editing, and “generating things in the world” with content generation.

At its current stage, Runway boasts clients like “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the VFX artists behind the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” as well as creators like MrBeast.

The features Runway offers creators and editors

Runway has features it calls “AI magic tools,” which can not only generate images, but also expand them, make them move, put videos in slow motion, and erase and replace objects within them.

On the editing side, Runway works on browser, which has been helpful for Quinn Murphy, a video editor who works with popstar Alicia Keys, for on-the-go editing.

Another feature Murphy has used is “Green Screen,” a tool that simplifies rotoscoping, a historically time-consuming task of isolating subjects in a video to change their background. In traditional video editing, this would be done frame by frame, but Runway’s AI can do it automatically.

This is also the tool VFX video creator Kevin Parry used to edit the Netflix logo behind him in one of his YouTube videos.

On the creative side, Runway’s launched Gen-1, a tool that enables video-to-video editing. Users can upload video content they shot and change its style through text prompts, effectively generating endless new videos.

For example, Martin Haerlin, who describes himself as an “AI-powered director” on Instagram, has used video-to-video creation extensively.

“This is a perfect example, the video required the initial iPhone shot that he recorded and the text prompts,” Valenzuela said. “There’s no pre-processing or post-processing.”

The next step for Runway is a text-to-video model, called Gen-2, which allows the generation of entire videos from a text prompt. The product is at an early stage, and currently can only create rudimentary videos — although directors like Paul Trillo have already generated short films with it.

“Think about it as a new kind of camera,” Valenzuela said. “We’re in the black-and-white early 1910s camera stage. It works, it captures light, it allows you to see something, but it’s still silent, it’s not for long sequences.”

Runway wants to develop Gen-2 so that users can generate any kind of content, and Valenzuela expects that will change creative processes from the ground up.

The aim with Gen-2 is not to remove human input from the creative process altogether, however.

“The common misconception is people think you are going to type in ‘Get me a Star Wars movie’ and you will generate a Star Wars movie, three hours long, with nothing else but a single text round,” Valenzuela said. “It’s allowing you to do it faster because maybe you don’t have to go site to shoot, but you still have to have an idea of how you want to put the videos together and what kind of story you want to tell.”