Midjourney Finally Hits “Play”

How the new V-1 Video Model shifts the platform from beautiful stills to living, breathing clips, and what that means for your workflow today.

Jun 19, 2025

When Midjourney’s founder David Holz started talking about real-time, open-world simulation back in 2023, a lot of us smiled politely and went back to compositing our static hero shots.

Fast-forward to June 2025 and the first tangible building block of that vision has landed: V-1 Video, an image-to-video (I2V) model that turns any Midjourney art, or even an external still, into a five-second motion clip. It’s not the holodeck yet, but it’s a very real step in that direction.

What ships today

The pricing math

Midjourney will be charging about 8x more for a video job than an image job and each job will produce four 5-second videos. This means a video is about the same cost as an upscale. Or about “one image worth of cost” per second of video.
Plans: Basic users can play, but you’ll burn Fast-minutes quickly. If video becomes core to your pipeline, upgrading one tier (or using Relax-Video on Pro) keeps budgets sane.

A starter workflow (tested this morning)

Generate stills as usual—V-7, Niji, whatever your heart desires.
Animate:
- Automatic first (good baseline).
- If timing or arcs feel off, switch to Manual and add a prompt
Extend: Stitch together up to 20 seconds inside Midjourney.
Polish externally: Drop the clip(s) into Capcut or Premiere for sound, pacing, and color tweaks. If resolution is a bottleneck, run the final render through Topaz Video AI or Magnific.