OpenAI Sora: Is It Worth the Hype After My First 10 Minutes?

I’ve been trying to get into OpenAI’s Sora for a while now and it’s been blocked, locked, waitlisted, the whole deal. But I finally got access and I figured the best thing I could do is just show you what happens when you sit down with this thing for the first time. 🤷
No polished demo, no cherry-picked results. Just me clicking around, getting confused, figuring it out live. 😄

“I’m going to show you the interface. I’m going to show you how I’m going to be using it or how I intend to use it, because I haven’t used it before.” That was literally my starting point.
And honestly if you’re a creative professional or just an AI nerd who wants to know what this Sora AI tutorial experience is really like before dropping money on a subscription, this is for you.

The Sora Interface: What You Actually See When You Log In

So you get past the login screen and the first thing that hits you is this dark mode layout with a left-hand sidebar. Clean looking. Feels modern. But there’s immediately a lot going on and not a ton of guidance about where to start.

The sidebar breaks into two main sections: Explore and Library. Under Explore you’ve got Recent, Featured, and Saved tabs. Under Library there’s All Videos, Favorites, Uploads, and the option to create a New Folder.

Here’s what caught me off guard. The Recent tab isn’t your recent stuff. “Recent is actually forcing everyone’s video to be seen.” It’s a social feed. Other people’s generations are just… there. Scrolling.
It’s like OpenAI built a little TikTok inside a video creation tool, which is a choice. “Featured is probably the handpicked videos” and yeah, that checks out. Those are the curated, impressive ones OpenAI wants you to see first.

The Saved tab is your bookmark list, whether it’s your own work or content from other creators you want to reference later. And the whole vibe reminded me a bit of Midjourney’s community gallery, except Midjourney lets you search through it way more easily. Sora’s discoverability felt rougher around the edges in comparison.

The center of the screen when you’re in Library just says “Create your first videos using the composer below or visit EXPLORE for inspiration” which is fine, but I had to poke around for a minute before I really understood the flow.

Uploading Media: The Legal Wall You Didn’t Expect

I clicked the Uploads button and honestly at first nothing happened. I’m sitting there clicking and nothing’s responding. I think it’s meant for drag-and-drop rather than a traditional file picker, which is a weird UX decision but whatever, I adapted.

Once I figured that out I got hit with the Media Upload Agreement. And this is where things get serious fast.

The agreement literally says: “This is a powerful tool, please use it creatively and respectfully.” Which I actually appreciate. But then there’s a second notice that really drove the point home: uploads with people will fail, and you will not be charged any credits.

“Interesting so I guess they’re really trying to prevent deep fakes over here.” That instinct was right.

OpenAI built a multi-layer moderation system into Sora specifically to combat this. According to their safety documentation, the platform scans your text prompt before generation, then reviews uploaded materials with image recognition, and then does a frame-by-frame check of the rendered output for anything that slipped through.
Public figures and copyrighted characters face significant generation restrictions. For regular people there’s a feature where you can upload your own likeness and grant permission, but nobody else can use your face without that.

So I tested the upload with a picture of Santa instead. Dragged it in, showed up on the dashboard, no issues. Smart move on my part honestly because Santa isn’t filing any takedown requests.

Your First Prompt: How Sora Text-to-Video Actually Works

Back in the Library tab I went to All Videos and found the composer bar at the bottom of the screen. This is where you write your OpenAI Sora prompts.

I typed out: “Create a video of Santa creating an origami reindeer in secrecy while he leaves the origami deer as a present under a tree and a child walks in and scares him.” Ridiculous prompt? Sure.
But I wanted to see how it handled specific narrative beats, multiple characters, sequential actions, an emotional beat. Give me something hard to do or don’t give me anything at all.

Before hitting generate, you’ve got controls along the bottom bar for the important stuff:

And here’s the thing that matters financially. “Creating will use @ 100 at current settings.” Every generation costs credits and the cost scales with resolution, duration, and number of variations. Crank everything up to 1080p at 20 seconds and you’re burning through credits fast.

The platform gives you two creation modes. There’s the basic Text & Image mode where you type a description and optionally upload a reference image. The description on-screen says: “The less you write, the more details will be filled in. The more you write, the more your direction will be followed.”
That’s a useful mental model. It’s not that longer prompts are better, it’s that you’re trading Sora’s creative interpretation for your specific direction.

Think of it like telling a cinematographer “shoot something beautiful” versus handing them a 40-page shot list. Both work, just very differently. And then there’s the Storyboard.

The Storyboard: Where Sora Gets Actually Powerful

This is the feature that separates Sora from just being a fancy prompt box. The Storyboard lets you lay out your video along a timeline using a combination of text prompts, images, and clips for each segment.

I popped my Santa image in there, expanded the text description, and started playing with the timeline. You can control how each clip flows into the next; it has “to do with how the blending begins” between segments, which gives you directorial control over the pacing and visual transitions.

There’s also a Presets menu in Storyboard mode. Stop motion, archival, film noir, and more. “Are these all the presets?” I found myself clicking through each one watching the preview shift.
They’re style filters for your generation, and they meaningfully change the output. No presets is the default, which gives you the rawest output.

One thing that caught me off guard: it appears that generated content may be visible to other users on the platform’s social feed by default. That social feed aspect may not be fully optional, and if you’re working on something private or client-facing, that’s worth checking before you start generating.

First Results: Did It Actually Look Good?

The Santa video rendered and honestly, it looked really good. Way better than I expected for a first attempt with a goofy prompt and no reference image. “Because I didn’t give them any” reference and it still produced something coherent and visually compelling. I was impressed.

The motion was smooth, the scene had actual depth to it, and the origami reindeer concept translated surprisingly well from pure text. Sora can generate video with synchronized audio, and OpenAI offers options for balancing speed and fidelity in generation, which is a big deal if you’re iterating a lot.

Is it perfect? No. You can tell it’s AI-generated if you look closely enough and some of the hand movements on the origami felt a bit floaty, like the fingers weren’t quite sure where they were supposed to go.
But for a 5-second 480p test clip from a first-time user who typed one sentence, it holds up.

All videos generated by Sora include a visible watermark and embedded C2PA metadata so platforms can verify the content was AI-created. This metadata is designed to persist with the file, which is a solid accountability move.

What About the Blending and Clip Workflow?

After my first test I started messing with blending multiple clips together in the activity center. This is where you take separate generated segments and stitch them into something more cohesive. I was testing with a skateboard concept at this point, trying to see how transitions between different prompts would look, which is where things get real.

The blending controls let you adjust how one clip transitions into the next, and the activity center on the right side of the screen shows all your videos being produced. You can bounce between the activity center and the main composer by clicking “All Videos.”
The workflow is functional but I’ll be honest, I had to “speed up everything” in post-production because turnaround time adds up when you’re doing multiple clips back to back.

For anyone used to editing in Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, the Storyboard and blending system will feel familiar conceptually but the execution is different enough that you’ll need an adjustment period. It’s not a traditional editor.
It’s more like directing an AI cinematographer who interprets your notes and sometimes takes creative liberties you didn’t ask for, which is cool and annoying in equal measure depending on the day.

Final Thoughts

My first ten minutes with Sora were messy, a little confusing, and honestly kind of thrilling. The interface isn’t perfect. The upload button doing nothing on first click, the forced social feed, the unclear credit costs—these are all things that need polish.
But the actual output quality from a simple text prompt is genuinely impressive, and the Storyboard feature gives you enough creative control to see how this tool could fit into a real production workflow.

If you’re a creative professional weighing whether to invest time and subscription money into Sora, my honest take is this: it’s worth experimenting with, but set your expectations for a powerful early tool rather than a finished product.
The deepfake safeguards are strict and smart, the generation quality punches above its weight, and the whole experience feels like you’re watching the future of video production put itself together in real time. I’m going to be making a lot more content like this so stick around. There’s a lot more to test here.