Veo 3 vs Hy4 preview: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Veo 3 and Hy4 preview — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Veo 3
Text-to-video model that generates synchronized high-resolution video and realistic audio (dialogue, SFX, ambience) from text or image prompts.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Produces synchronized, high-fidelity video from text or image prompts, capable of producing 1080p outputs and coherent visual sequences.
- Integrated Audio Synthesis: Generates realistic, synchronized audio tracks including dialogue, sound effects, and ambient soundscapes that align with the visual content.
- Vertex AI REST API Integration: Available as a RESTful endpoint (models such as veo3, veo3-pro, veo3-fast, veo3-pro-frames) enabling programmatic generation, batching, and deployment in production pipelines.
- Safety Filters and Watermarking: Built-in safety filtering and imperceptible watermarking help with policy compliance and provenance tracking for generated content.
- Model Variants and Performance Modes: Multiple variants allow trade-offs between quality and latency (e.g., fast vs pro modes) and support special modes like first-frame control for deterministic framing.
- Creative Camera and Scene Control (via Flow): When used with Flow or similar interfaces, offers direct control over camera motion, angles, and perspective for cinematic composition and previsualization.
- Imagen-to-Video and Editing Support: Supports image-to-video generation and integrates into video-editing pipelines and automation tools (demonstrated by community tools and wrappers) for iterative content creation.
- Generates synchronized video and native audio (dialogue, sound effects, ambience) in a single request
- Supports text-to-video and imagen-to-video prompt types
- Produces high-quality 1080p outputs (model- and config-dependent)
- Multiple model variants: veo3, veo3-pro, veo3-fast, veo3-pro-frames (including first-frame mode)
- Video editing capabilities (edit existing clips via prompts)
- Built-in safety filters and imperceptible watermarking
- Accessible via RESTful API on Google Vertex AI and via Google AI Studio UI
- Integrations and community tooling: Flow (creative interface), CometAPI wrappers, Hugging Face examples, GitHub pipelines (e.g., VeoCrafter)
Best for
- Filmmaking and Previsualization: Rapidly generate shot mockups and fully rendered scene takes (with camera motion and synced audio) for storyboarding and previsualization.
- Short-form Social Video Production: Automate creation of 1080p short-form videos with native sound design for reels, ads, and social campaigns using pipelines like VeoCrafter.
- Automated Advertising and Marketing: Produce multiple ad variants at scale with integrated dialogue, SFX, and ambient audio to accelerate campaign production.
- Game Cinematics and Trailers: Prototype and produce in-engine-like cutscenes and trailers with realistic audio and cinematography controls for concept and promotion.
- Educational and Demo Content: Create narrated tutorial clips, product demos, or explainer videos with synchronized voice and ambient audio.
- Content Curation and Showcases: Power galleries and directories (example: VeoVerse) to surface and organize Veo-generated videos for inspiration, discovery, and learning.
- Short-form marketing and social media video creation from simple prompts
- Prototype and previsualization for filmmaking and virtual production
- Automated ad and creative asset generation pipelines
- Content generation for games and interactive experiences
- Automated video editing and enhancement workflows
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.