Kling 4.0. Open to everyone on October 15. You get more control: smoother big moves, one clip up to 30 seconds, up to 15 reference pictures, and up to 10 marks for where the action or camera should change. Plan the shoot on 4.0.
Higgsfield. Cinema Studio still sets the camera, lens, and color for a shot of about 30 seconds. A newer path can make videos longer than 10 minutes, and they are working toward describing the video out loud. Use Cinema Studio for one shot. Use the longer path when the piece has to run past a minute.
FLUX 3 Image Klein. On October 15, Black Forest Labs released a free stills model you can run on your own computer. It makes pictures, not video. You can give it up to 10 reference images, it can make a 4K frame, and you can draw a box to say where something in the picture should sit. A smaller version is meant for an NVIDIA graphics card with 8 GB of memory, in ComfyUI or Diffusers. The older Flux stills card and FLUX 3 Video are still in the catalog. Use Klein when you want the still made on your own machine.
Ideogram 4.5. Released October 1. Most image tools misspell words inside a picture. Use Ideogram when the frame itself has to show readable type: a movie title, a poster, a street sign, or a name on a door.
Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite. A cheaper, faster version of Grok video, available since October 8. Clips run 1 to 15 seconds, up to 1080p, with sound included. The full 1.5 model still looks better. Use Lite to try ideas. Use full 1.5 for the shot you keep.
New cards. Utopai X (inside PAI), OpenArt, FLUX 3 Image Klein, Krea, and Vidu Q3. Higgsfield, Firefly, OpenArt, and Krea have a Hub badge. A hub is a workspace that runs other companies' models. The badge does not mean it looks better.
Google. The cheap test version of the Veo 3.1 API turns off on October 22, 2026. Veo itself stays in Google Flow. If you connect by API, use Gemini Omni Flash.
Rights. Nothing new on what is safe to use. Firefly and Moonvalley Marey were trained on material those companies say they have the rights to. Seedance, MiniMax, and Wan are still in active copyright disputes. For the 99th Academy Awards, acting has to be performed by a human, and the screenplay has to be written by a human. Sound, visual effects, and other crafts may use AI. Using AI neither helps nor hurts a nomination. The Academy can ask how it was used. 99th Academy Awards rules (PDF)