Google’s Veo now turns portrait images into vertical AI videos

Jan 14, 2026 12:00 AM - 4 months ago 123221

Jess Weatherbed

is a news writer focused connected imaginative industries, computing, and net culture. Jess started her profession astatine TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Google is making its Veo 3.1 AI video exemplary salary person attraction to the reference images you want generated clips to beryllium based on. The institution is releasing caller ocular improvements for the “Ingredients to Video” tool that was introduced past year, alongside expanding autochthonal vertical video support and solution upscaling features.

The Ingredients to Video instrumentality allows Veo users to make videos based connected up to 3 reference images, pulling successful materials for illustration characteristic subjects, backgrounds, and textures to person much power complete really the results will look. Google says this update will make videos “more expressive and creative,” and supply “richer speech and storytelling.” There are besides consistency improvements that should beryllium much perceptible — Veo 3.1 should now guarantee a characteristic looks the aforesaid crossed different clips and environments, and will fto users reuse objects, backgrounds, and textures crossed scenes.

Clips generated utilizing Ingredients to Video will now besides support vertical outputs. This follows Google giving developers the expertise to generate vertical videos successful Veo past year for text-based prompts without references. Users tin prime to output videos successful a autochthonal 9:16 facet ratio that’s fresh to upload to platforms for illustration TikTok and YouTube Shorts, alternatively of manually cropping the results successful video editing software.

Google is adding Veo’s improved Ingredients to Video and image mode features to the Gemini app starting today, and integrating those devices into YouTube Shorts and the YouTube Create app “for the first time.”

Lastly, this update allows Veo 3.1 users to upscale their generated videos to a 4K resolution, up from the erstwhile 1080p limit. Google says that 1080p video procreation has besides been improved to supply “a sharper, cleaner video.” This isn’t the autochthonal 4K solution that Google claimed Veo was tin of generating back successful 2024 — thing we person yet to spot successful immoderate type of Veo that’s launched to the nationalist — but on-platform upscaling is amended than nothing.

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