The owner's pictures could only be attached after the script existed, so the
writer planned a piece in ignorance and the pictures were fitted to finished
words afterwards. That is backwards.
Making a video is now two steps. The project is created on hold, collateral is
attached, and only then does the writer run — knowing it has a photograph of
the actual product and eleven seconds of pool footage to write toward.
Footage is a link plus an in and out point, set by scrubbing the video itself.
The renderer already trimmed arbitrary sources with in/out, so this needed no
change to the cut at all, only somewhere to put the information.
A finished video was a dead end from this page: you could watch it or download
it, and the only way back into the shots, cutaways and cut was to know the
script URL. Edit goes to the detail screen, which is now where re-filming and
the cut live.
Three things were unclear or missing:
- "Make the frame" reads as though it might film the shot. It draws one still,
the opening frame, and films nothing. Say so.
- Once a project was ready there was no way to film it again, so editing a
shot afterwards led nowhere. The film card now appears for a finished video
as "Film it again".
- Nothing explained that these per-shot buttons are optional. Filming draws
any missing frame and makes any missing cutaway itself, so they are there to
preview, not to complete.
A shot that continues the previous one seeds from that shot's real last frame
and correctly has no opening still of its own. Flagging it as a lost likeness
was wrong and would send someone chasing a problem that is not there.
Also distinguish a frame drawn after the fact from the one actually used at
film time, so the audit trail does not imply a seed that was never sent.
A video was filmed where shot 1 had a photo selected but no opening frame. The
seed was therefore empty and Veo was handed the written description alone, so
it invented a plausible bulldog: no collar, wrong eye colour. Nothing on this
page suggested anything was missing.
The worker now draws any missing frame before filming rather than proceeding
without a likeness, so this says that is going to happen and why it takes
longer.
The thumbnails are 110px squares cropped square, which is too small to check
the thing they exist to record — the collar, the eye colour, the markings that
have to survive into the video.
A video came out with the wrong dog — no collar, hazel eyes instead of black —
and there was no way to tell from this page whether a reference photograph had
been used at all. It had not: the shot had a photo selected but no opening
frame, so Veo was given the written description only and invented a plausible
bulldog.
Show both images side by side, and say loudly when there is no opening frame,
because that is the exact signature of a likeness that silently went missing.
Cost was a single number, which now hides two very different things: about
$0.40 a shot of video generation against roughly $0.015 of voice conversion.
Per shot, show which voice was actually dubbed in, so a conversion that failed
and silently fell back to Veo's own audio is visible rather than invisible.
The reason was already being stored on the project, but the page showed a bare
"could not finish" and a Start again button. A dead link is the most common
cause and it is the reader's to fix, so it needs saying out loud.
The old field asked owners to describe a voice in prose, and that prose went
straight into the Veo prompt. Nobody can reliably describe a voice, and the
description matched no actual voice, so nothing held the character steady
between episodes.
Now the owner picks an ElevenLabs voice and can listen to it first. That single
choice drives the Veo prompt, the writer's sense of the character, the word
budget per shot, and the voice the finished clip is redubbed into. The prose
box stays as an optional note that reaches the writer only.
The old field asked owners to describe a voice in prose, and that prose went
straight into the Veo prompt. Nobody can reliably describe a voice, and the
description matched no actual voice, so there was nothing holding the character
steady between episodes.
Now the owner picks an ElevenLabs voice and can listen to it first. That single
choice drives the Veo prompt, the writer's sense of the character, the word
budget for each shot, and the voice the finished clip is redubbed into. The
prose box stays as an optional note that reaches the writer only.
