Brief T2 — the life scene: rainy night, a delivery rider hands a bag of steaming buns to a customer under a shop awning. One generation per tool, no retries — what you see is the first take.
$9.54 per finished minute · ~6 min wall-clock on this brief
$15.00 per finished minute · cleanest image of the three
$17.28 per finished minute · and that minute is landscape
| Kling 4.0 | Veo 3.1 Quality | Runway Gen-4.5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watermark | Yes — “KlingAI 4.0”, bottom-right | None | None |
| Vertical 9:16 | True vertical · 1080×1920 | True vertical · up to 1080×1920 | Locked 16:9 in text-to-video · 9:16 via image-to-video only |
| Speed | ~8 min avg | ~15 min avg · queue ran ~9–30 min | ~10 min avg · fastest single run ~3.5 min |
| Cost / finished min | $9.54 · $12.00 at renewal | $15.00 | $17.28 |
| On-screen text | Mirrored gibberish in timestamps | Zero artifacts — only clean tool | Gibberish signage |
| Best for | Vertical drama & serialized shorts on a budget | Client-facing clips, faces, text-heavy scenes | Speed on simple scenes · image-to-video workflows |
Scores are weighted over the three protocol dimensions with logged evidence — output quality, cost, speed (70% of protocol weight, renormalized) — so the ranking is provisional. Languages, rights/terms and editing control are not scored until they are run and logged. No score on this page exists without a test log behind it.
Full script rendered as audio on the free tier — the only clean finish.
Completed the video on free credits — with the watermark on the export.
Free tier caps video at 1 minute; the script runs longer, so it never started.