How to Use Seedance on Runway: Modes, Caps and Cost

Affiliate disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up through one of them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This never affects our ratings or conclusions.

Seedance on Runway runs in four creation modes — Reference, Keyframe, Edit and Extend — caps a single generation at 30 seconds and 50 reference inputs, and is billed by the second: 20 credits per second at 480p, 30 at 720p and 68 at 1080p. At the $0.01 per credit that Runway’s API pricing guide publishes, that is roughly $0.20, $0.30 and $0.68 per finished second. Those numbers describe Seedance 2.5; the older Seedance 2.0 model is still in Runway alongside it with three modes, a 15-second ceiling and a different rate card.

Every figure below was read off Runway’s own pages on 2026-08-24 (data checked 2026-08-24) — the help centre articles, the Seedance product page, the pricing page and the developer pricing guide. Where two of those pages disagree with each other, we say so rather than picking the flattering one. For the cross-platform view of what Seedance costs elsewhere, see our cheapest way to use Seedance breakdown; this page is the single-channel deep dive.

Seedance on Runway: what you are actually buying

Runway is not a ByteDance property. Runway’s own help centre opens the Seedance 2.5 article with the sentence: “Seedance 2.5 is a third-party video model in Runway, developed by ByteDance as the successor to Seedance 2.0.” That framing matters for everything below — the credit rates, the resolution ceilings and the plan gates are Runway’s, and they do not have to match what Dreamina or the BytePlus API offer for the same model. Our Seedance 2.0 access matrix maps which channels are first-party and which are not.

Two Seedance generations live in Runway at once, and confusing them is the single most common mistake in this topic:

Both columns read from Runway’s help centre spec tables and product pages on 2026-08-24.

The practical reading: 2.5 is the long-form, many-reference model; 2.0 is the cheap-to-iterate model because of Explore Mode, which we come back to below. Neither one gives you 4K in the web app.

The four creation modes in Seedance 2.5

Runway exposes all four modes in Tools mode; Workflows gets dedicated nodes and Agent picks for you. Here is what each mode is for, in Runway’s own words, followed by what it means when you sit down to use it.

Reference

Runway describes it as: “combine images, video and audio in a single generation, with each input playing a specific role. Use when you want granular control over what gets pulled from each input.”

This is the mode the 50-reference cap was built for. You are not just handing the model a mood board — you name each input in the prompt and assign it a job. The help centre’s guidance is that with images “you might use one reference for a subject and another for a background or accessory”, and with video or audio “you can preserve motion or sound while changing the style, or keep the structure while swapping out other elements entirely.”

Reference is also the only mode with every setting unlocked: audio, aspect ratio, resolution, duration and output format are all yours to set.

Keyframe

Runway describes it as: “set a First Video Frame and a Last Video Frame, then prompt the motion between them. Use when you need precise control over how a shot begins and ends.”

If you have used start/end frames on any other Runway model, this is the same idea with Seedance’s motion model behind it. It is the mode to reach for when a shot has to land on a specific composition — a product hero frame, a logo lockup, the frame the next clip cuts from.

Edit

Runway describes it as: “change an existing video from a prompt or a sketch. Use when the shot is close but a detail needs to change.”

Edit has two constraints worth knowing before you plan around it. Runway states that “Edit and Extend both take a source video and match its aspect ratio, so neither mode has an aspect ratio control”, and adds that “Edit also matches the length of the input video and has no duration control.” So Edit cannot reframe and cannot retime — it changes content inside the box your source already defines.

Extend

Runway describes it as: “continue an existing video forwards or backwards from a prompt. Use when you need more footage on either side of a shot you already have.”

Backwards extension is the underrated half; the pre-roll case is the obvious one — asking for the dancer to walk onto the stage before your existing shot begins, rather than shooting it separately.

The behaviour that trips people up is what comes back. Runway spells it out: “Each extension is a standalone clip: the output contains only the new footage at your set Duration, and your original video is unchanged. Extending a 30-second video by 5 seconds returns a 5-second clip that picks up where the original left off.” You then assemble the pieces in Runway’s Studio. Extend is not a “make my video longer” button; it is a “generate the next shot, in continuity” button.

Sketching instead of describing

One feature that only exists in these two modes: “In Edit and Extend modes you can draw directly on a frame of your source video instead of describing a change in words. The drawing becomes an image reference attached to that moment in the video.” Your annotation enters the prompt as an image reference pinned to a timestamp in the source clip — written in a form like @Image 1 at ss:SS — and Runway notes that sketches “work best in Edit mode.”

That is a genuinely different interaction from prompt-only editing, and it is the strongest argument for doing Seedance edit work inside Runway rather than on a first-party surface.

Which settings each mode exposes

Reproduced from the settings matrix in Runway’s “Creating with Seedance 2.5” help article, read 2026-08-24.

Read that table before you commit to a pipeline. Edit and Extend expose no resolution control, which means the resolution decision — and therefore the per-second rate you are about to pay — is made upstream, when you generate or upload the source.

The caps: 30 seconds and 50 references

The two headline numbers are the reason this model is worth a workflow change, so here is exactly how Runway states them.

Duration. The spec table reads “4s to 30s, or Auto”. Runway’s summary sentence is that Seedance 2.5 “generates a single video up to 30 seconds long from a text prompt plus up to 50 references”. Thirty seconds in one pass is the pitch: it is a complete ad spot, a full product demo or a multi-scene sequence without a stitch line.

References. “A single generation accepts up to 50 references: 30 images, 10 videos of up to 30 seconds each and 10 audio clips. In Keyframe mode you can set a first and last frame.”

Note the nesting: each of those 10 reference videos can itself be up to 30 seconds, so the model is ingesting up to five minutes of source video plus 30 stills plus 10 audio clips to produce a single clip. That is an enormous conditioning budget next to Seedance 2.0 on the same platform — 9 images, 3 videos and 3 audio clips, with total video and total audio duration each required to be under 15 seconds.

Aspect ratios and formats. The settings list in Runway’s help centre article, read 2026-08-24, gives Auto, 21:9, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4 or 9:16, delivered as MP4 or MOV. Audio generation is a toggle, available in all four modes.

What Seedance actually costs per second on Runway

Runway publishes Seedance’s rates in credits per second of output, in two places that agree: the help centre spec table and the developer pricing guide (both read 2026-08-24).

The published credit rates

Rates read from Runway’s developer pricing guide and the Seedance help articles, 2026-08-24. The 4K row is an API-tier rate; the web app spec table for Seedance 2.0 tops out at 1080p.

Turning credits into dollars

Runway’s API pricing guide states that credits can be purchased for $0.01 per credit. At that rate, the arithmetic is straightforward — these are our calculations from Runway’s published numbers, not figures Runway prints:

The single most expensive habit on this platform is running 1080p while you are still exploring. A 1080p second costs 3.4x a 720p second on Seedance 2.5. Block out the shot at 480p, lock the prompt, then spend on the final pass.

The surcharge people forget

Edit and Extend feed a source video into the model, and Runway bills that input separately: “plus 15 credits per second of input and reference video” at 720p. Worked example, again our arithmetic: extending a 20-second 720p clip by 5 seconds is 5 x 30 = 150 credits of output plus 20 x 15 = 300 credits of input — 450 credits, $4.50, for five seconds of footage. The input side costs twice the output side.

Runway does not state on these pages how a trimmed or partially used input is metered, so treat the calculation above as the upper bound and check the estimate the interface shows you before generating.

Your plan changes the price of a credit

Credits are not all worth the same, because a subscription’s included credits have an effective unit cost. Runway’s pricing page on 2026-08-24 listed Free with 125 one-time credits, Standard at $12/month billed annually ($15 monthly) with 625 credits per month, Pro at $28 ($35) with 2,250, Max at $76 ($95) with 9,500, and Enterprise on request. Dividing price by credits:

Plan prices and credit allowances read from Runway’s pricing page 2026-08-24; the last three columns are our arithmetic.

Two conclusions fall out of that table, and neither is obvious from the marketing pages:

1. On the Standard plan, your included credits are worse value than top-up credits — $0.0192 versus $0.0100 each. Standard buys you access, not volume.
2. A Standard plan holds roughly twenty seconds of 720p Seedance 2.5 per month — under one clip at the cap. If Seedance 2.5 is the reason you are subscribing, Pro is the realistic floor and Max is where the per-second cost finally drops below the top-up rate.

Runway’s credits article sharpens that second point: on Standard, Pro and Unlimited “credits do not roll over and are reset within 24 hours of your billing date”, while purchased credits “do not expire” and Max may roll over up to one month of unused credits. Unused Seedance budget on the lower plans is gone.

For the same math done across Dreamina, BytePlus and the aggregators rather than inside Runway, see our Seedance pricing review.

Where Seedance 2.0 still wins: Explore Mode

There is one line in the Seedance 2.0 spec table that has no equivalent in the 2.5 table: “Unlimited generations in Explore Mode”, with the qualifiers “Explore Mode is supported for 480p and 720p resolutions” and “1080p is only supported while in Credits Mode.”

Unlimited generations at 480p and 720p, on a model with a 15-second ceiling, is a materially different economic proposition from 30 credits a second. Runway’s Seedance 2.0 article states the feature is “currently available to users on a Standard plan or higher”.

The Seedance 2.5 help article’s spec table lists no Explore Mode row at all. We are reporting the absence of a line from a document, not a denial from Runway — but as the pages read on 2026-08-24, there is no unlimited path to Seedance 2.5 and there is one to Seedance 2.0.

That reshapes the sensible workflow. Iterate composition, camera language and prompt phrasing on Seedance 2.0 in Explore Mode, where a bad take costs nothing but time; move to Seedance 2.5 only when you need what 2.5 uniquely has — length past 15 seconds, more than 9 image references, Edit, Extend or sketch-based revision.

Seedance 2.0’s three modes map onto 2.5’s four closely enough for that to work. Runway describes them as: “References — Best for blending elements from multiple images or videos into a single generation”; “Start / End frames — Best for traditional image-to-video (start frame only) or keyframe control (start and end frames)”; and “Text to video — Best for generating without any image or video inputs. Also a good option when working with realistic human subjects, as it tends to avoid the moderation constraints that can come with image-based inputs.”

That last clause is worth filing: on 2.0, text-to-video is Runway’s own suggested route around image-input moderation friction.

Two places Runway’s own pages disagree

Cross-checking four Runway surfaces on the same day turned up two mismatches. Both are the kind of thing that quietly breaks a production plan.

1. Is 1080p available on Seedance 2.5? The Seedance 2.5 product page states: “Output is available at 480p and 720p.” The help centre spec table read the same day lists “Output resolutions: 480p, 720p, 1080p”, the settings section offers “480p, 720p or 1080p”, and the credit table prices a 1080p tier at 68 credits per second. A rate card is harder to publish by accident than a marketing line, so the help centre is the more likely current state — but if 1080p delivery is a contractual requirement for you, confirm it in the app before you promise it.

2. Where does 4K live? Runway’s developer pricing guide carries a 4K row for seedance2 at 150 credits per second. The Seedance 2.0 web app spec table lists output resolutions as “480p, 720p, 1080p” with no 4K. The plain reading is that 4K is an API-tier resolution rather than a web-app option, which matches what we found when we documented the Seedance API routes — but it means a “Seedance does 4K on Runway” claim is only true of one surface.

Neither mismatch is a scandal — both are what a fast-moving integration looks like mid-flight, and why every number here carries a date.

Runway versus the first-party route

Runway is one channel among several, and it is a licensed third party. Choosing it should be a deliberate trade, so here is the honest shape of it.

Reach for Runway when you need Edit, Extend or sketch-based revision on footage you already have; when your material lives in Runway’s Studio and Workflows already; when you want one subscription that covers Seedance alongside Runway’s own models; or when you want Agent to pick models for you.

Skip Runway when your only requirement is generating clips as cheaply as possible. Runway adds a credit layer on top of a model you can reach directly, and the 4K path on ByteDance’s own surfaces has no equivalent in Runway’s web app. Our Seedance 2.0 complete guide covers the first-party generation workflow, and the Seedance 2.5 briefing tracks what ByteDance has shipped where.

Consider an aggregator when Seedance is one of several models you want behind a single balance. Multi-model platforms such as Pollo AI list Seedance next to Veo, Kling and Runway’s own models on one account — a different markup and a different set of trade-offs, covered in our cheapest way to use Seedance comparison.

One thing Runway does better than most third-party hosts: it names the model, publishes a spec table and a rate card, and states its provenance. Many platforms selling Seedance access do none of those, which is the problem our official site versus clones guide exists to solve.

A workflow that respects the caps and the meter

Putting the modes, the caps and the rates together, this is the sequence that wastes the fewest credits:

1. Block out on Seedance 2.0 in Explore Mode at 480p or 720p, on a Standard plan or higher. Unlimited generations means prompt iteration is free. Settle the composition and the camera language here.
2. Assemble the reference set before you switch models. Seedance 2.5’s ceiling is 30 images, 10 videos and 10 audio clips; naming each input’s job in the prompt is the whole point of Reference mode, and gathering them first stops you burning 2.5 credits on missing assets.
3. Choose the mode by what is fixed. Nothing fixed yet → Reference. Opening and closing frames fixed → Keyframe. A finished shot that needs one detail changed → Edit. A finished shot that needs footage before or after it → Extend.
4. Set resolution deliberately, once. Edit and Extend inherit resolution from their source, so the decision is made at generation time, not edit time. A 1080p exploration is a 3.4x tax on every second.
5. Budget the input surcharge into Edit and Extend passes. A long source video costs more to feed in than the new footage costs to make.
6. Assemble in Studio. Extensions come back as standalone clips; the continuous cut is something you build.

If the plan calls for more than about twenty seconds of 720p Seedance 2.5 in a month, price Pro or Max before you start rather than after your credits run out mid-project. Our Seedance tiers explained guide covers how the model variants differ once you are choosing between them.

Sources checked on 2026-08-24

SeedanceTips is an independent publication. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Runway, ByteDance, Dreamina or BytePlus. Every specification, limit and rate above was read from Runway’s own pages on August 24, 2026 and may change without notice; the dollar figures and per-plan unit costs are our arithmetic on Runway’s published credit numbers, not prices Runway publishes. Verify current rates in the Runway app before committing paid work.