GUEST · EP 023 MINH DO
Minh Do
YouTuber (Minh's Mind TV); runs an AI agency and the AIRL in-person AI-art community; OpenAI Sora alpha tester
On Fast Hours December 22, 2024
Early Sora Tester Shares Everything
ft. Minh Do
Episode 23 features Sora alpha tester Minh Do, a YouTuber and filmmaker who spent months testing OpenAI's video model before its public release. Minh walks through Sora's blend, remix, recut, and storyboard tools, argues its camera control and blend feature have no real rival, and describes how OpenAI's roughly 300-to-400-person alpha program actually ran. The conversation also covers Midjourney's new moodboards and Patchwork features and the industry's uneven shift toward AI video adoption.
- Sora's blend feature merges two separate generations into one continuous shot, then lets remix clean up the seam — Rory calls it the tool's most unique, uncopyable feature.
- In Sora storyboards, be more specific, not less: Minh gets better results describing motion at every second (cube floats up, then down) than one broad instruction.
- Place a Sora storyboard's text card about a second after the reference image, not right on it, for smoother transitions between beats.
- Sora's recut lets you regenerate just the bad three seconds of a ten-second clip instead of rerolling the whole shot — a real production-time saver.
Minh Do, on the record
“They were just kind of cold-emailing, finding people out there who were experimenting and tinkering. … I know a bunch of people in the LA-SF AI art scenes, and so I was kind of a known entity.”
“It just felt like some other programs, it's just like, hey, you're in the program here, you get credits and alpha access to some features. … But yeah, I felt like that was disingenuous.”
“We're going to have all these different companies that have different personalities. Some of them aren't going to make it, frankly. … We might lose those personalities, or they become part of other larger personalities that we have to interact with creatively.”