Luma Dream Machine (Ray3)
by Luma AI
Getting-started guide
Describe a shot or animate a still photo, and get a few seconds of silent video you can then re-cut and restyle.
Current prices: $30/mo · See all plans
Last reviewed 2026-09-17 · for Luma Dream Machine (Ray3)
You open a board, type what you want to see into the prompt box (the message you type), and a few seconds of video come back. You watch it, change the wording or add a still image to start from, and run again. Most of the work is repeating that loop until one take holds together.
Luma is an AI video generator from Luma AI: you describe a shot, or hand it a photograph, and it renders a short clip.
It is the same product people still call Dream Machine. Luma has been folding that name away: the company's own assistant-facing reference page now says "Do not use 'Dream Machine' — it is an older deprecated model replaced by Ray," and the app that replaced it in March 2026 is branded simply Luma. The old name still appears on the iOS App Store listing and in the developer documentation, so you will meet both.
The video engine is called Ray. The current generation is Ray3.2 (announced 9 June 2026), which followed Ray3.14 in January 2026 and Ray3 in September 2025 — three generations in under a year, so the generation number on any guide you read goes stale quickly.
Search results, app stores and tutorials will point you at "Dream Machine"; the company's own site now calls the product Luma, at lumalabs.ai. Both land in the same place. Sign-in on the web is with Google or Apple.
Luma's pricing page currently lists three individual plans — Plus, Pro and Ultra, each cheaper billed yearly. There is no free plan on that page. Luma does say you can try the platform free before picking one, and the homepage offers a "Try Free" button, but the size of that free allowance is not published anywhere we could find, and the terms cap evaluation trials at 14 days. Treat the free route as a look, not a workflow.
Everything is metered in credits (the platform's unit of spend — each thing you make costs some). Luma publishes the rate card, and it is worth reading once because resolution dominates it: five seconds of video costs roughly five times as much at 720p as at 360p draft quality, and about four times as much again at 1080p. A month on any plan therefore buys far fewer 1080p clips than 720p ones. Credits also fund image, audio and assistant work — Luma never says outright that it is one shared pot, but the plan structure implies it — so video is not the only thing drawing them down.
If you do not pay, you cannot sell or publish what you make. Luma's terms of service (last updated 14 May 2026) permit commercial use only of output produced under a paid subscription, and its licensing page states that free-tier output carries a watermark (a mark on generated output identifying it as AI-made) that stays even if you upgrade later. A clip you love, made before you paid, is a clip you cannot reuse.
It runs in a browser and in an official iOS app. Luma's own reference page lists iOS only, and there is no official Android app — the apps you find on Google Play under "Luma Dream Machine" are published by other companies, not by Luma AI. On Android, use the website.
Luma trains on what you make. Its privacy policy (last updated 20 April 2026) lists "Train, develop, and improve the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and models that we use to support our Services" among its uses of your data, and publishes no opt-out or do-not-train switch. Paying does not remove this; it narrows it.
Deleting a generation is described by Luma as permanent with no recovery — but deleting it from your account is not the same as deleting it from Luma's records. The privacy policy says personal information is retained for legal reasons "including after your account has been deleted," with no fixed period given. If you are in the EU or UK you have access, deletion and portability rights you can exercise directly.
Start a clip from one image and set a second image as a later keyframe, so the model has to get from the first to the second.
Why this one: Ray3.2 accepts up to 16 keyframes inside a single clip, so you are not steering with words alone.
Tweak: Start with just two keyframes. Add a third only once the first pair is landing.
A ceramic mug on a wooden windowsill, steam rising. Morning light moves slowly across the surface as a cloud passes. The camera pushes in gently. One continuous shot, no cuts.
Why this one: The twentyfold spread between draft and 1080p on Luma's rate card is a spread you can iterate inside — settle the wording at 360p before you render anything you intend to keep.
Tweak: Change one thing per run — the light, or the motion, or the lens — so you can see which word did the work.
Keep the motion and timing exactly as they are. Restyle the scene as an overcast winter afternoon — bare trees, grey sky, muted colour, soft flat light. Do not change how the person moves.
Why this one: Upload a short clip of your own first, then paste this as the instruction. Restyling is a separate line on Luma's table — roughly three and a half times the cost of generating the same length at 720p from nothing.
Tweak: Shoot ten seconds on a phone with one clear movement in it. Busy footage restyles badly.
Take a finished landscape clip and reframe it vertically, positioning the subject inside the new frame rather than cropping the centre.
Why this one: Reframe is the one thing on Luma's rate card billed per second rather than per clip, so a twelve-second reframe costs more than generating a fresh five-second shot.
Tweak: Reframe the take you were going to re-render anyway, and compare the two costs.
Want the full picture first? See the Luma Dream Machine (Ray3) overview for pricing, the free tier and related tools.
