Choosing the Right Model
NanoBanana or Imagen 3? Sora 2 or Veo 3.1? A simple decision framework for picking the right model for images, video, and music — without wasting tokens.
Opening a model picker for the first time feels like reading a restaurant menu in a language you do not speak: everything sounds impressive and you have no idea what to order. Relax — choosing well comes down to three questions: what medium, draft or final, and what special requirements. Let us build that reflex.
Step 1: pick the medium
Start from the deliverable, not the technology. A thumbnail, poster, or product shot is a text-to-image job. A moving scene with sound is text-to-video. A jingle, soundtrack, or full song is text-to-music. Mixed projects usually start with images anyway — stills are the cheapest way to explore a visual idea before animating it.
The VAR2 lineup at a glance
| You want | Reach for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fast, cheap image drafts | NanoBanana | Seconds per image — perfect for exploring ten ideas |
| Polished photoreal finals, clean short text | Imagen 3 | Excellent realism, lighting, and typography |
| Cinematic video with native audio | Veo 3.1 | Strong physics and synchronized sound generation |
| Playful, expressive social video | Sora 2 | Punchy motion, audio included, great for short-form |
| A complete song | Suno | Vocals, lyrics, arrangement, and mix in one pass |
Want the deep dives? Each model has a full profile: Imagen 3, Sora 2, Veo 3.1, and Suno — strengths, quirks, and prompt tips for each.
The draft-then-finalize workflow
Your tokens are a creative budget, so spend like a producer: iterate cheap, finalize expensive. Explore compositions on a fast model, lock the winning prompt, then re-run it on a premium model and upscale the result. Video burns the most tokens per attempt — storyboard with still images first, a technique covered in Storyboarding Multi-Scene.
- Medium: image, video, or music?
- Stage: exploring ideas (cheap and fast) or producing the final (premium)?
- Special needs: readable text, real audio, a specific character, a vertical format?
- Budget check: enough tokens for 3-4 attempts? If not, draft smaller first.
A video prompt done right
A slow dolly-in shot of a lighthouse on a stormy cliff at dusk, waves crashing against the rocks, cinematic lighting, ambient storm sounds and distant thunder
Video prompts describe three layers an image prompt never needs: motion (waves crashing), camera (slow dolly-in), and audio (storm sounds, thunder). Miss a layer and the model improvises it for you.
Put the framework to work — pick a model and generate your first video scene. Open Video Generation