The pipeline
Create Animated Videos with AI
The generation is the short part. Most of what decides whether you end up with a usable video happens before the prompt is written and after the clip comes back.
Order of operations
Six stages, and only one of them is the model
Each stage constrains the ones after it. Getting the order wrong is the usual reason a project needs regenerating from the start.
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01 · Decide the frame
Aspect ratio has to be chosen before generating, not after. Cropping a 16:9 clip to vertical throws away half the image and usually the subject's head with it, and generated footage has no margin to reframe into.
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02 · Write for the shot
A prompt is describing a single continuous shot, not a scene. Asking for a cut, a location change or a second character arriving is asking one generation to do a job that needs two.
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03 · Generate
Expect to run it repeatedly. Output is stochastic, so the practical unit of work is a handful of attempts from which one is chosen — which is also what makes credit pricing matter.
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04 · Stitch
Anything longer than a single clip becomes an editing problem. Continuity between generations — the same character, the same light, the same room — is the hardest thing to hold and the most visible when it fails.
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05 · Sound
Usually absent, and usually added separately. Sound does more for perceived quality than another generation pass will, because it gives the eye a reason to forgive the image.
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06 · Encode
Whatever the platform requires. Re-encoding an already compressed clip degrades it again, so the fewer round trips between the generator and the final file, the better it holds up.
Frame rate
Smoothness is not detail
A point worth being clear about, because it is where the numbers on a spec sheet mislead most reliably.
Many generators output at a modest frame rate, and the gap to 60 fps is closed afterwards by interpolation — inventing the in-between frames from the ones either side. The result moves more smoothly and contains nothing that was not already there. It is genuinely useful for slow motion, and it is not the same as a model that generates at a higher rate natively. A “60 fps” claim does not distinguish between the two.
Continuity
Where stitched clips give themselves away
The face changed
The single most noticeable break. Reference images and character-consistency features exist precisely because independent generations do not agree on what a person looks like.
The light moved
Colour temperature and key direction drift between generations. It reads as a continuity error even to viewers who could not name what changed.
Screen direction flipped
A subject walking left in one clip and right in the next reads as two different journeys. Prompts have to state direction because the model has no memory of the previous shot.
The background rearranged
Furniture, signage and doorways move between generations of nominally the same room. Wide shots suffer most, because there is more of it to disagree about.
House rules
How this will be written
No invented numbers
No scores out of ten, no star ratings, no tier boards. Where something is better, it gets said in words and the reason is shown.
Only claims we can stand behind
Nothing describes a test that did not happen. Pricing and feature claims are checked against the vendor's own pages.
No paid placements
Nothing here is sponsored, and outbound links carry no affiliate tracking and earn no commission. No company pays to be included or to be written about more kindly.
This site is new and there are no guides on it yet. The stages above describe the workflow rather than any particular tool's handling of it, and no timings or throughput figures appear anywhere on this page because none have been measured.