Google moved Vids, its video creation and editing app, onto Omni 1.2 Flash on November 5. That’s Google’s newest video model, and the headline change is length: AI clips can now run up to 15 seconds. Google also says anyone with a Google account can make a few of them each month without paying.

What changed

Google’s Workspace post says you now set a clip’s length with a slider, anywhere from 3 to 15 seconds, so you can match the pacing of the edit instead of trimming afterward. The same post points to better consistency when you use references, meaning a character or product should look the same from one generation to the next, plus greater speaker variety, with a wider dynamic range in the generated audio. Google’s own announcement adds that uploaded reference images help keep characters and scenes consistent from the first frame to the last.

The free part is the bigger news for a lot of people. Google says anyone with a Google account or a Workspace subscription can generate up to three 15-second videos a month in Vids at no cost. Paid Google AI plans and most Workspace business plans get more, measured in seconds per month on Google’s help page.

Under the hood, Google’s model announcement says Omni 1.2 Flash generates up to 15 seconds natively, up from 10 seconds in Omni 1.1, and its API price dropped 30%, to $0.07 per second for 720p video. The Workspace rollout started November 5 and was expected to take one to three days to show up, with no admin switch for it.

Why it matters for designers

Fifteen seconds is a useful length. It covers a social ad, a product loop, an animated title card, or a shot that bridges two pieces of real footage. With 10 seconds or less, you were usually stitching clips together and hoping the subject still looked the same in each.

The reference image consistency matters for brand work. If you can drop in a product shot or a character design and have it hold up across a clip, that’s a lot closer to something you can actually show a client than a model that drifts by the third second.

And a free tier inside an app many teams already use means this is easy to try. If a client already works in Google Workspace, they may well try it themselves, so it’s worth knowing what it can and can’t do.

What to watch out for

The free allowance is small, and Google’s pages describe it two ways. The announcement says three 15-second videos a month, while the Vids help page lists 60 seconds a month for a personal account, with a footnote that personal accounts might have some restrictions on AI video editing. Check the help page for your account type before you plan around it.

The developer announcement mentions things like multi-turn editing of a clip and upscaling to 1080p or 4K, but those are described for the model and Google’s other tools. Google’s Vids posts don’t say which of them reach Vids, so don’t assume they’re there.

Every clip carries Google’s invisible SynthID watermark, and nothing in the announcements covers commercial rights or what happens to uploaded references. We haven’t tried this ourselves, so treat the sidebar as a list of things to confirm before a clip goes into client work.