Kling 4.0 vs Kling 3.0: what actually changes

Kling published its own comparison of 4.0 against the 3.0 series on 30 September. Most of the headline numbers moved; a few did not, and those matter as much when deciding whether to wait for 4.0.

Length: up to 30 seconds

Kling 3.0 generated 3 to 15 seconds. Kling 4.0 generates 3 to 30 seconds natively — long enough for a scene with a beginning, a turn and an end in one clip rather than three stitched together.

Keyframes: from two to ten

3.0 had start and end frames and nothing in between. 4.0 keeps those and adds multiple keyframes, up to ten: images pinned to moments in the clip that the model has to pass through. That is the change that turns a prompt into something closer to a storyboard.

Picture: same resolutions, deeper colour

Resolution does not change: 720p, 1080p and 4K in both. What changes is dynamic range, from 8-bit SDR to 10-bit HDR at 1080p and 4K — though Kling's announcement describes HDR as coming soon rather than available now. 4.0 also adds 21:9 ultrawide to the standard aspect ratios.

Sound: stereo

3.0's audio was single-channel. 4.0's is two-channel stereo, and spoken languages grow from Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish to add Portuguese, German, French, Hindi and more.

References: up to fifteen

This is the largest jump. 3.0 took up to seven images or subjects, or one video of up to 15 seconds plus four images or subjects. 4.0 takes up to fifteen reference assets in one generation: up to ten images, seven subjects, and five videos totalling 30 seconds.

Editing: one workflow

In 3.0, editing lived in separate Omni workflows. 4.0 folds text-to-video, image-to-video, references, continuation and editing into one multimodal workflow.

When you can use it

Kling says 4.0 Flash went to a limited group of users for early access on 28 September, and the full version launches in October. Until then, 3.0 is what most accounts have, and nothing in the table makes a 3.0 project obsolete — a fifteen-second clip with start and end frames is still that.