Google’s AI video model Veo 3.1 is rolling out to enable a major overhaul for Flow, the company’s filmmaking tool. The refresh prioritizes stricter prompt adherence, better audiovisual fidelity, and—most crucially—precision editing controls that effectively move the AI video process away from one-shot generation and closer to a controllable iterative production.
What Veo 3.1 brings to Flow: new controls and editing features
There are four main controls added to Flow in Veo 3.1: Ingredients and Frames from the previous release work inside Video now, and there is Extend for making video move beyond the scope of its clip, and on-object insert/remove. Ingredients to Video allows creators to feed it several reference images—costumes, textures and environments, for example—to analyze those elements and assemble a scene that integrates them convincingly. (Consider it a styleboard that actually takes motion.)
Frames to Video acts like bookends. Users provide a start image and an end image, and Flow creates a single continuous shot that connects the two. For directors and storyboard artists it’s a way to get a controllable arc in one shot without hand-animating for every beat.
Extend tackles duration. Rather than ending clips at the original output, Flow can start from a final second and continue on, extending shots for longer, seamless sequences. This solves a common problem with AI video, where promising shots cap out at just a few seconds.
The new insert/remove feature offers the same practical, post-like editing to AI-native footage. Want to introduce any prop, re-sculpt light or erase a distracting background object? It can place new elements with plausible shadows and reflections, while removal preserves what remains of the scene as if the object didn’t exist. Combined with better prompt fidelity and motion consistency, these are the sort of tools that finally take Flow out of the demo realm and into production.
Why it matters to creators and real-world production teams
Control is what separates a pristine AI sample from a usable shot. It lets creators drive the first frame, last frame and everything in between so Flow better adheres to actual workflows: previsualization for directors, concept reels for agencies, mood pieces for music videos and fast product shots for e-commerce teams.
Take the above brand brief: a dark, rainy city alley at dusk with an established color story and branded signage. Ingredients to Video can feed a designer a color swatch, a reference alley and the logo treatment. Frames to Video makes sure the shot starts with a close-up of the neon sign and ends on a wide reveal. It also contains clean haze in the background and wet pavement reflections. “Extend” turns a five-second beat into a thirty-second vignette. The result isn’t just a good-enough clip, though, but a controllable one.
And in its focus on editability, it reflects what professionals demand from conventional tools. On a more tangible level, it cuts down on reshoot loops, shortens soul-draining storyboarding time and allows teams to iterate on multiple versions before diving into costly live-action or 3D pipelines.
Where it sits in the AI video landscape today
Google previewed Veo earlier this year as its most high-fidelity video producer yet, concentrating on cinematic camera motion and text-to-video from natural language prompts. The introduction of structured editing in the latest Veo 3.1 puts Flow on a collision course with rivals which are control layer-focused, including Runway’s Gen-3 tools and Pika’s inpainting procedures. Sora from OpenAI is still in semi-closed access, but has raised the bar for realism and scene coherence over longer shots.
Where Flow might distinguish itself is in the depth of the pipeline. Rather than one-and-done generation, Veo 3.1’s features sound like a loop: kick off with references, specify start and end points, sprinkle with extension selectively, and tweak bits surgically. For teams that measure success by how many revisions they didn’t have to make, that loop is more important than raw eye candy.
Access via Gemini API and Vertex AI for developers
In addition to Flow’s native interface, Veo 3.1 integrates with the Gemini API and Vertex AI, so developers and studios can incorporate these capabilities into custom pipelines, asset managers and review tools. For enterprise groups that are already using Vertex AI for model governance and collaboration, Veo can be plugged into existing MLOps practices, content review queues, and security controls.
For ordinary creators, availability in the Gemini app widens access. That rapid iteration between mobile and desktop—drafting on a phone, fine-tuning on a workstation—has become an increasingly common part of contemporary creative life. Google’s approach to integrating its AI tools reflects a trend that analysts from firms like Gartner and IDC identified: the winners in the AI wars will be the tools that show up inside of (not next to) existing workflows.
What to watch next: long-form coherence and safety
Two areas bear watching. First is that consistency in long shots is a difficult issue for all AI video systems—character identity, wardrobe and lighting continuity. Veo 3.1’s tools for editing help, but it’s long-form coherence that is the mark for any narrative work. Second, provenance and safety. Major technology companies, such as Google, have backed standards such as the C2PA content authenticity specification. Integrating robust watermarking and metadata into AI-generated video will be crucial for broadcasters and advertisers.
For now, Veo 3.1 offers Flow a significant leap from prompting to directed filmmaking. If you’ve been waiting for AI video that warps itself around your storyboard rather than the other way around, this is the update to try.
