With just 1,000 credits, creating lots of videos in OpenAI’s text-to-video tool, Sora, can feel like an uphill battle. But I can make my Sora AI video credits last the entire month with a couple of simple shifts. It’s easier than you think, too.

4Limiting How Many Videos I Create Daily

I’m a casualSorauser and don’t need it for anything professional. So, it’s quite easy for me to limit how many videos I create each day. I generate three videos at most— normally, two is my upper threshold.

If I truly needed to make more videos, I’d consider subscribing to another AI video generator. Like many people, Irefuse to pay $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro(and even then, I wouldn’t have unlimited credits).

Storyboarding Creation in the Sora app

3Being Intentional With My Videos

I could argue that Sora’s monthly credit limits are a good thing, even if they are somewhat limiting. Since I don’t have much wiggle room, I’m forced to be more intentional with what I create. There are plenty ofways to dramatically improve Sora videos, too.

When prompting, I primarily use the storyboard feature. My results have been much better each time I’ve done this than with ordinary text-to-video prompts. And because they’re more specific, I don’t have to spend extra credits to correct things as often.

Editing the duration of a video in Sora

2Creating Shorter Videos

Since I use ChatGPT Plus, I can create five or 10-second-long videos. 10-second videos are double the number of credits as five-second ones, so only creating the shortest videos possible is an easy way to preserve my allowance.

If I really wanted to extend a story, I’d consider making 10-second videos. However, I don’t see that happening because both are quite short. It would have to be more like 10 minutes rather than seconds.

1Using 720p Square

I can only use 720p videos because I haven’t got ChatGPT Pro, but 720p square consumes half the number of credits as videos of the same resolution with different aspect ratios. Since I only use Sora to have fun and experiment, I don’t see much of a reason to use the ordinary version of 720p.

I could use lower resolutions if I truly wanted to, but I don’t like the quality beyond 720p. Nonetheless, if you don’t care about the quality too much, you may want to try 480p square, which consumes just 20 credits.