Captioning a month of clips: the credit math
Prices a realistic month of short-form captioning in base renders, and shows why the clips you cull move the bill as much as the preset tier does.
Every guide, comparison and workflow we’ve published on Production Workflow.
12 articles
Prices a realistic month of short-form captioning in base renders, and shows why the clips you cull move the bill as much as the preset tier does.
For batch work, how many generations you hold in flight decides wall-clock time more than per-clip speed. How to measure throughput and order a queue.
Key direction gets re-rolled on every generation. A verbatim lighting block carried across all prompts in a sequence, plus the shot-by-shot review check.
A block week that stops production eating outreach and delivery: named sales days, batch days, and one day for review, invoicing and next week's briefs.
Generation got cheap and finishing did not. A two-phase quote with a selection gate, so a client's appetite for options stops eating your finishing capacity.
When the hit rate is unknown until you try, quote a contingency: a paid test block, a stated attempt ceiling, and a fallback deliverable that still ships.
A newer model quietly shifts colour, motion and faces across a look you already shipped. The golden-set pass that catches it before a client does.
Approval at the end is approval after the spend. A four-gate structure — concept, key frame, motion, export — and exactly what locks at each one.
Runtime stopped predicting effort. Build a rate card on the nine shot attributes that actually drive attempt counts, with tier bands and an attempt allowance.
A translation table from client language to testable production changes, plus the three questions that resolve a vague note before you spend attempts.
A model that wins every side-by-side can lose badly on credits per shipped shot. How to log first-pass usable rate and let it decide which model you route to.
'It doesn't look consistent' isn't one problem. It's four — identity, wardrobe, set and lighting — each with a different cause and a different fix.