A credit-saving workflow for longer projects

A single clip is easy to budget. A longer project, such as a short story told in eight shots, a product launch with a dozen cutaways or a music video, is where credits disappear. Usually it isn't the final renders that eat the budget. It's the experiments run at full quality that never make the edit.

The fix is a simple order of work: plan on paper, solve the look in stills, solve the motion in cheap drafts, and only then spend on the final. Prices below are each model's default setting at the time of writing; the exact price for your settings is shown before every run, and the pricing page has the details.

Step 1: Write the shot list first

Before you generate anything, write every shot as one line: what we see, what moves, which camera move, and how long it lasts.

• "Shot 3: close-up of hands opening the box. Locked off. 5 seconds."
• "Shot 4: she lifts the watch and smiles. Slow push-in. 6 seconds."

This takes ten minutes and saves more credits than any other step. It stops you from generating shots you don't need, and it tells you which shots need sound, which need a long take and which can be short.

Step 2: Solve the look in stills

Images cost a fraction of video. Every question about how the project looks, whether that's the character, the outfit, the light or the room, can be answered with stills before a single frame moves.

At the time of writing:

• Tanvo Image v1, the house engine, makes 1K images from text at 5 credits.
• GPT Image 2.5 and Qwen Image 3 start at 10 credits at 1K. Qwen Image 3 is built for readable text and layout, so use it for title cards and anything with lettering.
• Nano Banana 2 Lite and Seedream 5.0 Lite edit at a flat 15 credits.
• Nano Banana 2 works from up to 14 photos at 25 credits for 1K, which helps when you need the same person across many frames.

Make one start frame per shot. These become the first frames of your video runs, which means the look is already settled before you pay for motion.

Step 3: Draft the motion at 480p

Now animate each start frame at low resolution. The goal of a draft is to answer three questions: does the motion happen in the right order, does the camera do what you asked, and does the face hold?

Good draft options, at their defaults:

• Tanvo Video v1: 480p, 5 seconds, 20 credits.
• MiniMax H3: 480p, 6 seconds, 90 credits.
• Seedance 2 Mini: 480p, 6 seconds, 130 credits, with sound.

Keep drafts short. If the final shot is 10 seconds, a 5 second draft usually tells you whether the first beats work. Fix the prompt, not the resolution: if a draft looks wrong, it will look wrong at 1080p too.

Step 4: Lock the shot

When a draft works, write down exactly what produced it: the start frame, the full prompt, the model, the duration and the aspect ratio. Don't touch the prompt again. Small rewording before the final run is the most common way to lose a working shot and pay twice.

A simple way to do this is a text file with one block per shot:

1. Start frame: shot04_v3.png
2. Prompt: copied word for word
3. Model and length: as drafted
4. Status: locked

Step 5: Spend once at full quality

Only now do you move each locked shot to the model and resolution you want for the final. Some examples of where finals often go, at their defaults:

• Veo 3.1 for short shots with sound: Lite at 720p, 6 seconds, 115 credits.
• Kling 3.0 for detail, up to 4K: 720p, 5 seconds, 155 credits.
• Wan 3.0 for long takes up to 30 seconds: 720p, 5 seconds, 185 credits.
• Seedance 2.0 for native audio up to 1080p: 720p, 6 seconds, 480 credits.

Higher resolutions and longer durations cost more than these defaults, so check the price shown before each run.

More ways to save

• Use cuts instead of long takes. Three 5 second shots are often cheaper and easier to control than one 15 second take, and an edit hides small problems.
• Generate only the length you'll use. If the edit needs 4 seconds, don't render 10.
• Don't upscale experiments. Only locked shots go to high resolution.
• Re-roll the start frame, not the video. If a shot keeps failing, the problem is often the first frame. A new still costs far less than another video run.
• Failed runs are refunded. If a generation errors out, the credits come back, so there's no need to avoid a model because you're worried about a failure.

A sample budget shape

For an eight-shot project, a sensible split is a handful of stills per shot, two or three short drafts per shot, and one final per shot. Most of the runs happen on the cheap engines, and the expensive models only see shots that already work.

Start with the stills on the image page, then move to the video page.