Runway Gen-4 / Gen-4.5 Review — The Editorial Precision Standard for Professional AI Video

Runway Gen-4 (March 2025) and Gen-4.5 (December 2025) are closed-source commercial text-to-video and image-to-video models from Runway (New York, founded 2018, $860M raised, $5.3B valuation). Gen-4 introduced world consistency — maintaining character, location, and object identity across scenes from a single reference image. Gen-4.5 held the top spot on the Video Arena leaderboard at launch. No audio generation, 16-second max duration, no open weights. The benchmark for editorial precision and subject consistency in Western AI video. Rating: 4/5.