Gen-4 Image
Runway's Gen-4 image generation model. Cinematic quality stills with the visual language of Runway's Gen-4 video series — photographic richness, filmic lighting, and seamless use as starting frames for video generation.
What is Gen-4 Image?
Gen-4 Image is Runway's still image generation model from the Gen-4 model family. It generates high-quality images with the cinematic visual character that Runway is known for — photorealistic scenes, filmic lighting, and complex compositional depth that looks like it was captured rather than generated.
What makes Gen-4 Image particularly useful in a video-first platform like project.video is the workflow coherence it enables. Gen-4 Image output can be used directly as a starting frame for Gen-4 video models — meaning the same cinematic aesthetic carries from the still into the motion, and you can generate a coherent image-to-video sequence with consistent visual treatment.
For creative directors and content teams working with Runway's video models, Gen-4 Image offers a native way to generate still concepts, scene references, and storyboard frames in the same visual language as the video output they'll eventually produce.
Cinematic quality
Filmic lighting and depth
Still generation
Text-to-image from prompt
Video-ready frames
Use as Gen-4 starting frame
Runway aesthetic
Consistent Gen-4 visual style
How to generate images with Gen-4 Image on project.video
Open the composer
Go to your project.video dashboard. Gen-4 Image is available under Runway models in the image generation section.
Select Gen-4 Image
Choose Gen-4 Image for Runway's cinematic image quality. The model is optimized for photorealistic scenes, filmic lighting, and visually rich output.
Write your prompt
Describe your scene, subject, lighting, and style in detail. Gen-4 Image responds well to cinematographic descriptions — lens type, lighting direction, color grading style, and depth of field.
Generate and use
Generate your image. Use it standalone as a creative or commercial still, or feed it into Gen-4 Turbo or Gen-4.5 as a starting frame for video generation that continues in the same visual register.
Technical specs
Best use cases
Image-to-video pipeline starting frames
Generate a precisely crafted starting frame for Gen-4 Turbo or Gen-4.5 video generation. The visual consistency between Gen-4 Image and the video models means your starting frame and the resulting motion share the same aesthetic language.
Cinematic concept and storyboard imagery
Generate cinematic concept imagery for pre-production — scene references, shot compositions, lighting concepts, and color palette studies. Gen-4 Image's filmic visual quality makes it suited to professional creative development work.
Editorial and brand campaign imagery
Create campaign-quality editorial images for brands that need cinematic photography aesthetics without a film crew. The photorealistic, richly lit output translates well to magazine, web, and OOH contexts.
Environment and location visualization
Generate photorealistic environment images for location scouting visualization, production design, or set reference. The model's ability to render complex lighting and spatial depth makes it useful for film and commercial pre-production.
Example prompts
Prompts for Gen-4 Image work best with cinematographic language and specific lighting and composition details.
"A woman in a tailored charcoal coat standing on a rain-slicked Tokyo street at night. Neon reflections on wet pavement. Shallow depth of field, 85mm portrait lens, chiaroscuro lighting. Cinematic still, widescreen."
"Interior of an empty brutalist concrete library at dawn. Low horizontal golden light through tall narrow windows. Dust particles in the air. Shot on 35mm film, slightly desaturated, high contrast."
"A single espresso cup on a white marble surface, top-down overhead shot. Morning light from a window casting a long shadow. Clean, minimal, editorial food photography style."