Runway Act-One Is Retired: What the Gen-3 Performance-Capture Workflow Taught Creators

What Act-One solved

Act-One belonged to an earlier generation of performance-driven character tools. A recorded actor performance could guide the expressions and delivery of a synthetic or illustrated character, a different task from typing a camera prompt and waiting for a text-to-video result. In a production brief, record separate fields for the captured performance, the target character, the rights to both inputs and the render settings. That separation makes a historical project understandable even if the original application disappears. Archival demonstrations establish the former technique, not a promise of current access.

Why the retirement changes your instructions

Runway explicitly marks the Act-One guide as unavailable and dates the two Gen-3 retirements in July 2026. This is a stronger source for service status than an old tutorial or a screenshot of an interface. For an older project, retain the original video exports, prompts, character references and consent documentation rather than assuming the vendor will retain a usable regeneration endpoint. Do not label Act-One an active tier feature simply because it remains indexed in search results. A user starting today needs a different active workflow.

How to migrate a production brief

Begin by identifying whether the creative requirement is to animate acting, generate entirely new scenes or change an existing shot. The former points toward Runway’s documented Act-Two performance capture; ordinary generation points toward a current text/image-to-video model; localized footage alterations point toward Edit Studio. Rebuild one representative shot first, comparing mouth movement, gestures, framing and continuity against the archived output. Preserve the actual character specification and source audio; do not attempt to reproduce a retired button-by-button tutorial.

Consent, costs and deliverables

A recorded performance often depicts an identifiable person. Collect permission for performance reuse and any depiction of the final character before uploading material, and check contracts for the intended distribution channel. A retired model’s former rates should not be copied into current budgets; for an active replacement, verify the model, plan, generation length, cost unit and export terms independently. The relevant price registry is maintained by AI 10. Keep the historical Act-One entry in an archive, not in today’s checkout options.

When this guide is useful

This article is primarily for people maintaining archival tutorials, restoring an animation pipeline or auditing claims about early AI performance capture. New creators needing a working product should move to the separate Act-Two guide. A text-to-video model is an alternative when character-level expression transfer is not essential. None of these alternatives promises an identical visual result; the correct test is whether the new process satisfies the shot brief, permission constraints and editing schedule.

Worked editorial scenario

An animation studio discovers a 2025 course that instructs junior artists to prepare an Act-One driving take. The useful first action is not purchasing extra credits; it is checking whether that specific interface still exists. The studio can preserve the lesson’s goal—performance transfer—while rewriting the exercise for Act-Two. The updated assignment should require two render candidates and an edit decision with supporting notes, including why a still character reference was or was not chosen. This turns a retired tutorial into a transferable production competency instead of a broken set of interface clicks.

Sources & Further Reading

• Runway and official project documentation — actone (first-party source; checked 2026-10-25)