Google just tore down the paywall on one of its most useful AI tools. Anyone with a Google account can now generate full HD videos for free inside Google Vids, the company's browser-based video editor, the company announced on September 23.
The tool runs on Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, an AI model that turns text prompts, photos, audio, or existing clips into new video footage. Until now, that kind of generation mostly lived behind a subscription.
Not anymore. Head to vids.new, sign in with any Google account, and start generating in 1080p, the same crisp high-definition resolution most streaming platforms use, at no cost.
We tested it, and the creation process is pretty straightforward. That said, we were only able to generate 720p resolution videos in both horizontal and vertical resolutions.
Google also added a few editing controls that used to require a paid tool. Scene extension lets you lengthen a clip while keeping the lighting, characters, and setting consistent, instead of the footage suddenly changing halfway through.
Users can also set an exact scene duration so a clip lines up with a script or voiceover, and can upscale older, lower-resolution AI clips up to 1080p instead of regenerating them from scratch.
Every video the tool produces carries SynthID, a Google DeepMind watermark invisible to the eye but readable by machines, embedded directly into the video frames. Anyone can check whether a clip was AI-made by running it through Google's SynthID Detector, a separate tool built to catch AI-generated content passed off as real.
It is also very fast. We were able to generate a short video in around less than 30 seconds, which is a bit faster than the usual speeds using Google Flow.
Making a decent HD video used to mean paying for software, hiring an editor, buying a stock-footage subscription or owning a beefy computer capable of handling open source video models. Now it's a free browser tab, and that changes who can afford to produce video content at all, for better or worse.
Not every account gets the same amount of free generation. Personal Google accounts get a standard allowance, Google's paid AI plans unlock more, and Workspace Business and Enterprise subscribers get bigger generation pools plus admin controls for managing them across a team.
Gemini Omni first launched in May 2026 as a paid feature for Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers, with free access limited to YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create. Folding a free tier into Vids is the broadest release of that technology yet.
The timing is hard to ignore. OpenAI shut down the consumer Sora 2 app and website back in April 2026, and its developer API, the last piece still running, went dark for good today, the same day Google's free Vids rollout is landing.
Google has been racing on price too. It recently cut the API rate for its Veo 3.1 Lite model to $0.05 per second, undercutting developer-facing rivals while Chinese competitors like Kling and Hunyuan Video keep pressure on price from the other side.
Google says a companion feature, Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite text-to-speech, is coming next to turn written scripts into voiceover narration in more than 100 languages.
