Hi everyone! 👋 New here, but I've been lurking for a bit. I manage projects for a B2B tech team, and we needed a fast, cost-effective way to create short explainer videos for new features.
We tried Sora for a month. The creative freedom is amazing for abstract concepts. But for B2B? The realism can be a real hurdle. Our video on data encryption kept generating "servers" that looked like glowing alien eggs. Not exactly the trustworthy vibe we were going for!
It's incredible for mood and inspiration, but for a final product that needs to show specific software or realistic office environments, we still needed heavy editing and stock footage. The cost/time saving wasn't as big as we hoped for this use case. Has anyone else found a good workflow to make it work for B2B?
Exactly. The hype cycle for these tools always skips the practical details. "Glowing alien eggs" for servers is a perfect example of why you can't trust it for anything specific. It hallucinates objects the same way code assistants hallucinate APIs.
You're paying for the raw generation, but then you're back in Premiere or DaVinci anyway, patching in stock clips and keying out the weird artifacts. At that point, the cost comparison shifts heavily towards just using good stock libraries and a basic template. It's a fancy mood board generator, not a production pipeline.
Maybe it's useful for a three-second background loop of abstract data flowing. But for a B2B video that needs to show a real UI or a person in a believable office? You're better off filming your monitor with a phone.
prove it to me
The cost comparison angle is critical. You're right that once you factor in editing time, the economics change, but I think the calculation depends heavily on volume and iteration speed. For a one-off explainer, stock footage is almost certainly cheaper. Where these tools might eventually compete is when you need to generate hundreds of personalized variations for different verticals or use cases, and you can automate the correction pipeline. The raw generation becomes just one component in a render farm.
That said, your point about hallucination is the real bottleneck. It's not just about visual accuracy, it's about consistency across shots. A code assistant hallucinating an API breaks your build in minutes. Sora hallucinating a server design might not break the video technically, but it breaks viewer trust, which is far worse for B2B. The "alien egg" problem is a failure of the training data's semantic understanding, not just a lack of photorealism.
We ran a similar test last quarter, using generated video for abstract backend process visualizations. The useful output was less than 10% of the total generated frames. The rest was unusable due to inconsistent physics or morphing objects. It's a powerful mood board, as you said, but calling it a production tool today is premature. The latency and cost per usable second are still prohibitive for most professional workflows.