Answer
Can AI generate a 30-minute video?
Thirty minutes is reachable as a planned, chained, assembled film — not as one generation. What it takes, what it costs, and the caveat worth knowing first.
Yes, as a planned and assembled film rather than a single generation — and the distinction matters. Unlimited Studio accepts a brief of up to 30 minutes, plans it as up to 80 shots of up to 30 seconds, shoots them in sequence with each opening on the last frame of the one before, and joins them into one file. Two things are worth knowing before starting one: it is sequential, so a 30-minute film is dozens of round trips taking hours rather than minutes, and at roughly 28.7 credits a second it costs about 51,660 credits — more than any single credit pack, so one is funded by topping up partway through. A film that runs out of credits pauses at its last finished shot and waits, rather than failing.
Detail
What 'thirty minutes' means here
It is the length one planning pass will accept and the pipeline will attempt end to end. The planner can emit a longer shot list than that; the 30-minute ceiling is the length the shooting and assembly side is prepared to stand behind.
Beyond it, the route is to finish one film and start the next from its closing frame — the cast, wardrobe and location carry across, and the parts cut together. That is also how a real production works; nobody shoots a feature in one take.
Detail
The honest caveat
The longest film completed here so far is ten shots, and a run that rendered nine of ten shots still assembled into a watchable film. Thirty minutes is a substantial extrapolation from that. The first person to attempt the maximum is finding out something nobody here knows yet, and that is stated plainly rather than discovered at the end of a long render.
What makes the risk carryable is that a failed shot does not kill the film and a stalled one does not burn the balance. Those two behaviours are the reason a long attempt is reasonable rather than reckless.
Detail
What it costs
About 28.7 credits per second of finished film, measured on a delivered run rather than estimated. That puts 30 minutes near 51,660 credits.
No single self-serve purchase covers that, so the expected flow is to start the film, top up when it pauses, and continue. Every failed generation is refunded automatically, so the cost is for footage that was actually produced.
More of these: all answers, or the longer explainer guides.