Grok Imagine 1.5 — turn a single still image into video

Grok Imagine 1.5 is wired here as image to video, which means it will not start from a prompt alone. Open the video studio, switch to the Image to Video tab, and it shows up in the model list there and nowhere else on the site. Give it a still and one sentence about what moves.

So this is a two-step job, and the first step is not this model. Settle the frame in the image studio first. Nano Banana 2 is the quick way to get a usable still, and an image is cheap to get wrong compared to a clip. Composition, crop and light are decided there, at image prices.

The payoff for splitting it up is that you stop re-rolling things you already got right. The still is fixed. Between takes only the motion prompt changes, so a bad result tells you something specific instead of handing you a different picture.

A 4-second clip is 24 credits at 480p and 45 at 720p. That gap is the most useful thing about this model. It is also the reason to run every first attempt at 480p: three wrong guesses there still cost less than one take on Kling 3.0 Pro.

What 480p actually loses is detail at the edges of things. Small faces go soft, fine texture turns to porridge, and lettering warps the moment it starts moving. Motion, timing and camera behaviour all read perfectly well. Which is why the question at 480p is never whether the shot looks good. It is whether the movement is right, and 24 credits is enough to answer that.

720p is the ceiling and there is no setting that gets past it. Kie publishes exactly two prices for this model id, one for 480p and one for 720p, so a 1080p option here would be a tier nobody has priced. We would rather not offer it than guess. If the delivery has to be 1080p, Veo 3.1 Fast renders one for 163 credits and Kling 3.0 Pro for 180.

Length is linear. At 720p, 4 seconds is 45 credits, 8 seconds is 90, 12 seconds is 135. At 480p the same ladder runs 24, 48, 72. Nothing else on the form moves the number. Aspect ratio is free, and attaching a reference image is not charged differently from anything else.

Which makes a 12-second take cost exactly what three separate 4-second takes cost, and that is a real decision rather than a formality. Three attempts usually beat one long one, unless the shot genuinely cannot be cut. Quantity goes up to four clips per submission and each one is billed in full, so asking for four is spending four times over, not buying in bulk.

Grok Imagine is not the cheapest video on the platform, and it would be easy to leave that out of a page like this one. Seedance 1.5 Pro is 18 credits for 480p/4s and 35 at 720p, it accepts a text prompt with no image at all, and it goes to 1080p. What the extra credits buy on Grok is how it handles one small physical movement, which is a narrower claim than better.

Credits come from a plan or a one-time pack on the pricing page. A render that fails on the provider's side is refunded to the same balance automatically, with no ticket to file.

The model can already see the subject. Describing it again is an invitation to redraw it, and that is the failure mode behind most disappointing results here. Write "a red vintage car on a coastal road at sunset, cinematic" and you get a different car. Write what changes instead: the car pulls away from camera, everything else holds still.

A prompt that works has three parts and they fit in three sentences. What moves. What the camera does. What must not change. "Camera does not move" is a legitimate instruction and often the right one, because a model given no camera note invents a drift of its own, and it is rarely the drift you had in mind.

One beat per clip. Ask for a cut inside four seconds and you get a smear where the cut should be. If the shot needs two moments, that is two clips, and Batch mode on the same page runs several prompts in one submission. The prompt guide works through fourteen examples sorted by subject, along with the five ways these prompts usually fall apart.

Clips come back as picture only. Our request to this model carries no audio field, so plan on adding sound in the edit. A track from the song studio draws on the same credit balance, which keeps it to one purchase instead of two. If a shot genuinely needs audio generated with the picture, Veo 3.1 Fast is the one model here whose request does not switch sound off.

Assembly is yours. Grok is not among the models the music-video workflow builder accepts, since that picker takes Kling and Seedance ids only. A sequence of Grok clips gets cut together in your own editor.

Finished clips sit in your library, where you can play them back or download the file. Nothing you generate is visible to anyone else unless you publish it, and published work is what fills the public gallery.