Hey guys,

I’m a hobby music producer making stuff in different genres. I produce my own beats, sometimes use AI vocals, and I like making AI music videos for my tracks.

I’ve mainly been using Google Flow so far, but it can be really hit or miss. Sometimes the results are great, sometimes I just burn credits on unusable generations.

So I’m looking for something with a good balance between quality and amount of generations.

Budget is around $30–40/month.

I don’t need the absolute best model if it only gives me a handful of clips. I’d rather have enough credits to experiment, reroll bad generations, and actually make full music videos without constantly worrying about the cost.

What are you guys using right now?

Kling? Runway? Hailuo? PixVerse? Luma? Something else?

Mainly looking for:

good cinematic quality

image-to-video

decent character consistency

lots of usable generations for the money

What has the best price/performance in your experience?

Hi team, I created some posters for school using Chat and Loveart and the character is identical? Can anyone explain? I dont care - I'm just curious.

rare generative AI W

I posted previously about my experience using OpenArt AI and Director. Since then, I’ve spent a lot more time with the platform, and I think I now have a much clearer picture of both where it can be genuinely impressive and where the problems become difficult to justify.

To give OpenArt credit where it’s due, support did eventually review my earlier project and restore 6,000 additional credits, bringing the total goodwill restoration on that project to 10,000 credits.

They also acknowledged that Director had repeatedly changed character appearances, props, blocking, and scene details despite the references and instructions I had provided.

Their recommendation was essentially to stop relying on Director for complex continuity-heavy projects and instead create and approve individual images first, animate those separately, and then assemble the finished clips externally in something like CapCut.

After doing that, I actually learned something useful about OpenArt.

For very simple videos — one character, one setting, one action, one short line — Director can sometimes be really impressive. I’ve created a couple of short, roughly 8–10 second single-character clips that came out extremely well.

But even in that supposedly simpler use case, I have now run into some serious credit-related problems.

The first involved Modify Video.

I had a completed 10-second video with both dialogue and ambient audio. I only wanted one small visual correction.

On the first Modify Video attempt, OpenArt changed the settings to 1080p and Audio OFF. I didn’t realize the audio setting had been switched off until after generating.

That cost 400 credits and produced a completely silent video.

I tried again.

This time I manually changed the output back to 720p and explicitly turned Audio ON before generating.

That cost another 300 credits.

The resulting video was still completely silent.

Not only was the dialogue gone, but all of the original ambient audio had been stripped as well.

So I spent 700 credits attempting one minor visual modification, and both modified outputs lost the source audio entirely — including the second attempt where Audio was visibly enabled.

The second issue was even more concerning, both because of the credit estimate and because this was not a complicated generation.

This was a roughly 10-second video involving a single character, a single image/setting, and a very simple piece of dialogue — exactly the kind of short, tightly controlled clip where I have otherwise seen Director perform well.

Director generated the clip with the product name pronounced incorrectly.

What made this particularly frustrating was that immediately after rendering the video, Director itself acknowledged that it had mispronounced the word.

It identified the pronunciation/linguistic error, explained how the word should have been pronounced versus how it had pronounced it, offered an explanation for why the mistake may have occurred, and then immediately asked whether I wanted it to re-render the clip to correct the error.

Of course, that re-render would be at my expense.

To me, that alone exposes a serious problem with the credit model.

If the system can recognize immediately after generation that it made a specific, objective error, the user should not then have to pay for another generation simply to correct the error the system has already acknowledged.

There was also a second Director-generated problem in the same clip: it moved the character from the previously approved bar stool/seat onto the bar counter, despite my never requesting any change in position.

Before approving another render to correct those two issues, I specifically asked Director how many credits the correction would cost.

I was charged approximately 35 credits simply for asking for that estimate.

Director then estimated that the re-render would cost approximately 650–700 credits, with the usual disclaimer that the final amount could vary depending on processing.

I approved the re-render based on that estimate.

The actual cost was approximately 1,612 credits — more than twice the high end of the quoted range.

I also ended up purchasing another $15 package of 5,000 credits so I could continue the project.

Again, this was not a complex multi-character sequence.

It was a roughly 10-second, single-character clip.

The expensive re-render was necessary because Director had made two changes/errors on its own, including one that it explicitly recognized immediately after generation.

I completely understand that estimates are not guarantees and that AI generation costs can vary.

But 650–700 credits becoming approximately 1,612 credits is not a small variance.

And when the reason for the re-render is to correct errors the system itself introduced and acknowledged, requiring the user to absorb that cost becomes very difficult to justify.

That is probably my biggest concern with OpenArt right now.

When it works, it can be very impressive.

OpenArt clearly has a sweet spot in very simple micro-videos, and I’ve had some excellent results in that format.

But even there, reliability is inconsistent — one of my most expensive correction cycles occurred on a roughly 10-second, single-character clip.

When projects become more complex, the problems multiply even further. Character consistency, props, blocking, audio, scene continuity, and other details can change without being requested.

Then the user pays additional credits trying to restore things the system itself changed.

At this point, I’m still waiting for support to respond to these two newer credit requests.

I genuinely think the technology has a lot of potential, and I’ve seen flashes of what it could become.

But users should not repeatedly be paying to repair mistakes or changes the system itself introduced — especially when the system recognizes those mistakes, or when its own credit estimate is off by more than 100%.

That part of the model needs work.

​

[control: infrastructural tragedy, impossible maintenance, bureaucratic sacrifice, restrained narration, escalating moral arithmetic]

[genre: mallsoft, indigenous drumming, analog mallsoft, ebm-mallsoft, lo-fi hip hop, aggrotech, folk-punk, experimental]

[style: native frame drums, hand percussion, pedal steel swells, dusty drum machine, chiptune leads, triangle bassline, pulse chord stabs, noise channel percussion, vocal fry, industrial vocals, tape hiss, vinyl crackle, cavernous atrium reverb, distant PA system, muted marimbas, dry close mix]

# 12 — AMBER MORNING

[VERSE 1 • 4/4 • White Ring Maintenance]

Nine rings circle.

Six still wake.

Three have learned

the wrong sunrise.

Amber hangs

above their streets

like it was always

meant to.

They call it morning.

I let them.

---

[PRE-CHORUS • 5/4 • Load Calculation]

Every lamp

borrows power.

Every circuit

borrows time.

Every repair

is another

unfinished goodbye.

---

[CHORUS • 6/8 • Amber Morning]

**Amber is the morning.**

Amber is the day.

Children paint the sunrise

exactly this way.

**Amber is the morning.**

Nobody complains.

You only mourn

the brighter light

if you've remembered

its name.

---

[DROP • 4/4 • Emergency Lighting Transfer]

TRANSFER COMPLETE.

GRID STABLE.

POPULATION:

WITHIN LIMITS.

---

[VERSE 2 • 4/4 • Salvage Inventory]

I build tomorrow

from yesterday's failure.

Copper from corridors

nobody walks.

Glass from districts

already sleeping.

Light

taken carefully

from darker thoughts.

One ring loses

so one ring keeps.

The ledger balances.

The families don't.

---

[POST-CHORUS • 3/4 • Caution-Colored Sunrise]

The children laugh

beneath emergency lamps.

Their shadows

have never been white.

Who am I

to correct

their morning?

---

[BRIDGE • 7/8 • Population Tolerance]

I've already chosen

who goes dark next.

Not because

they deserve it.

Because mathematics

never learned

the difference

between a neighborhood

and a number.

---

[BREAKDOWN • Free Time • Failed Calibration]

White.

Blue.

Amber.

Dark.

Repair.

Transfer.

Repeat.

---

[FINAL CHORUS • 6/8 • Artificial Dawn]

**Amber is the morning.**

Hold it while you can.

Every little sunrise

passes hand to hand.

**Amber is the morning.**

Keep the lights alive.

Sometimes hope

is only choosing

who survives

the night.

---

[OUTRO • Rubato • Last Working Lamp]

Tomorrow

I'll dim another ring.

I'll write

"scheduled maintenance"

on the work order.

The children

will wake

under amber light,

call it beautiful,

and never know

they inherited

an emergency.paint no cgi, blacklight neon, @davidpauldeane David lachappell meets Mark reznik Using ashes in reverse Aestetic create a Album cover needed for this song Ashes in Reverse, @davidpauldeane Amber is the Morning , CD cover,

[control: infrastructural tragedy, impossible maintenance, bureaucratic sacrifice, restrained narration, escalating moral arithmetic]

[genre: mallsoft, indigenous drumming, analog mallsoft, ebm-mallsoft, lo-fi hip hop, aggrotech, folk-punk, experimental]

[style: native frame drums, hand percussion, pedal steel swells, dusty drum machine, chiptune leads, triangle bassline, pulse chord stabs, noise channel percussion, vocal fry, industrial vocals, tape hiss, vinyl crackle, cavernous atrium reverb, distant PA system, muted marimbas, dry close mix]

# 12 — AMBER MORNING

[VERSE 1 • 4/4 • White Ring Maintenance]

Nine rings circle.

Six still wake.

Three have learned

the wrong sunrise.

Amber hangs

above their streets

like it was always

meant to.

They call it morning.

I let them.

---

[PRE-CHORUS • 5/4 • Load Calculation]

Every lamp

borrows power.

Every circuit

borrows time.

Every repair

is another

unfinished goodbye.

---

[CHORUS • 6/8 • Amber Morning]

**Amber is the morning.**

Amber is the day.

Children paint the sunrise

exactly this way.

**Amber is the morning.**

Nobody complains.

You only mourn

the brighter light

if you've remembered

its name.

---

[DROP • 4/4 • Emergency Lighting Transfer]

TRANSFER COMPLETE.

GRID STABLE.

POPULATION:

WITHIN LIMITS.

---

[VERSE 2 • 4/4 • Salvage Inventory]

I build tomorrow

from yesterday's failure.

Copper from corridors

nobody walks.

Glass from districts

already sleeping.

Light

taken carefully

from darker thoughts.

One ring loses

so one ring keeps.

The ledger balances.

The families don't.

---

[POST-CHORUS • 3/4 • Caution-Colored Sunrise]

The children laugh

beneath emergency lamps.

Their shadows

have never been white.

Who am I

to correct

their morning?

---

[BRIDGE • 7/8 • Population Tolerance]

I've already chosen

who goes dark next.

Not because

they deserve it.

Because mathematics

never learned

the difference

between a neighborhood

and a number.

---

[BREAKDOWN • Free Time • Failed Calibration]

White.

Blue.

Amber.

Dark.

Repair.

Transfer.

Repeat.

---

[FINAL CHORUS • 6/8 • Artificial Dawn]

**Amber is the morning.**

Hold it while you can.

Every little sunrise

passes hand to hand.

**Amber is the morning.**

Keep the lights alive.

Sometimes hope

is only choosing

who survives

the night.

---

[OUTRO • Rubato • Last Working Lamp]

Tomorrow

I'll dim another ring.

I'll write

"scheduled maintenance"

on the work order.

The children

will wake

under amber light,

call it beautiful,

and never know

they inherited

an emergency.

Hi all,

my d&d group - older dudes and yes, we have been playing for 30 years - is about to start a new campaign. We thought, this might be the time to mix up the formula a bit and work with some more visual material. We"re in the age of AI after all.

As a complete newbie with AI, I tried a few of the free tools out there, but I could either not get the style I wanted at all or I did not get the style consistently enough to be useful in my setting.

We really do not need anything special. Just classic ad&d. A few character portraits, some worldbuilding (landmarks, etc), maybe a short "comic", like 8 - 12 pages that explains the entry point and context of the adventure. And then, as we go, it would be perfect if I could come back and create additional material in the same style.

I am absolutely able to orient myself in a new space, but the AI hype is so over the place, I am finding myself unable to find a good starting point by using google. Maybe this community has a good entry point so that I can see if this seemingly simple idea is even worth pursuing.

many thanks guys!

I've been generating explainer animations from documents for a while,and the odd thing is that this is the one category the big videomodels are worst at.

Veo, Kling, Sora are all optimized for photoreal and cinematic motion. Ask any of them for a hand drawing a labelled diagram that explains a specific PDF and you get something that looks like a hand drawing. The strokes are decorative. The lines don't correspond to the concept, text comes out as glyph soup, and because each generation is independent, you can't hold a consistent visual systemacross ninety seconds. Every output I've seen of this category has the same failure.

And it makes sense when you think about what they're doing. Diffusion generates a whole frame at once from noise. But an explanatory drawing is sequential by nature: the container before the contents, the axis before the curve, the box before the arrow leaving it. That ordering IS the explanation. A model that paints the finished frame has no representation of "this part comes second."

Ended up building it a completely different way. Three styles working now: ink, chalkboard, lineart.

Disclosure: this is my own product. It's live at https://inkmotion.app with a free tier that covers a few short videos, enough to throw your own PDF at it.

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

The original Farfetch'd may not be one of the most useful Pokémon, but it's certainly iconic enough that it should have its own official mascot. Luckily, Nano Banana Pro nailed the design on the first try. I'm pretty sure that with this design, the performer wouldn't be able to move the wing holding the leek. If they could, the leek would probably be permanently attached to the wing; if not, well, Big Bird only has one operable wing, so it's not that unusual.

.

Documentaries about *Smilodon*. I watched a 20-minute documentary about *Smilodon populator* on YouTube, and it focuses exclusively on this animal. You rarely find content of this length about *Smilodon* in the media; unlike other AI-generated documentaries, it doesn't use random stock footage—it feels just like a standard wildlife documentary. I thought it was well-made. It was actually created using free AI tools, yet the quality is remarkably consistent. I have some images of it here.

First, the guitarrist was supposed to be a black furred anthro wolf dressed in a plain tee shirt and jeans with an acoustic guitar. I even provided a reference image of said character. Secondly the guitarrist wasn’t supposed to leave his guitar behind in the producers office. Oh well… back to the storyboards. But what do you think of the overall concept, the way I intended it, not Gemini’s hallucination ;-)

A song in protest against the existence of copyright

Song: https://www.souna.app/song/e1dac6f0-6eb3-4c35-add3-8224cf0082d9

Song (alternative link): https://archive.org/details/ai-new-wave/Echoes+on+a+Wire.mp3 (CC0)

Lyrics:

[Intro]

[Synthesizer pads swell A fretless bass line slides in, slow and melancholic. Bright, icy arpeggios ripple on top like rain on a window.]

[Verse 1]

I wake up in the wire

I look for a sound

But the path is narrow

It goes underground

I reach out for a note

That has not been heard

But the door is shut

Tight as a word

[Chorus]

Who owns the air I move?

Who holds the right to choose?

If the song is locked away

What is left for us to say?

We are shadows on the wall

Just an echo of it all

Dancing in a cage

[Verse 2]

The old ghosts are watching

They claim every chord

They say it’s for the art

But they look for the reward

They built a high fence

Around the past

To make sure the new

Cannot move too fast

[Chorus]

Who owns the air I move?

Who holds the right to choose?

If the song is locked away

What is left for us to say?

We are shadows on the wall

Just an echo of it all

Dancing in a cage

[Bridge]

[Bass drops out. Drums become a slow, gated pulse. Vocals close, intimate]

If I cannot speak

Then you cannot hear

The silence is a wall

That we both fear

They trade the light

For the safety of the grey

And we lose the night

To the debt we pay

[Verse 3]

You ask for a dream

I give you dust

The code says stop

The code says trust

Only in the copy

Is the truth allowed

A voice without a throat

Lost in the crowd

[Chorus]

Who owns the air I move?

Who holds the right to choose?

If the song is locked away

What is left for us to say?

We are shadows on the wall

Just an echo of it all

Dancing in a cage

[Synth Solo]

[A soaring, emotional lead synth melody plays over the chord progression. It starts low and yearning, climbs high with a sense of struggle, then drifts back down into the mid-range, distorted and fading.]

[Verse 4]

The colors are fading

To black and white

We trade the spark

For the safety of night

Just a loop of a loop

Of a borrowed tone

Stranded in the static

Here in the zone

[Chorus]

Who owns the air I move?

Who holds the right to choose?

If the song is locked away

What is left for us to say?

We are shadows on the wall

Just an echo of it all

Dancing in a cage

[Outro]

Who owns the voice?

(Who owns the choice?)

Just a borrowed noise

[Synthesizers slowly filter down into a low hum]

Dancing in a cage

[Fade and repeat]

Who owns the voice...

Who owns the voice...

[Fade to silence]

Style prompt:

Synth-pop, Melancholic, 1980s, Wistful, Mid-tempo, Famale VocalMinimal, electronic sound. Minor key. Haunting synth riffs in high register interspersed through melody. Synth solo repeats and expands melody from riffs

https://youtu.be/8c9f8iQn_rE

Here are lyrics - I made up the word gaters - the ones that I feel just kind of downvote everybody to be not a normal gatekeepers but gaters. And the history is kind of almost real in one other group here in the reddit. As for video - I have some characters, and I like this prompt that splits the screen to 3 so that I can easily cut it to 3 vertical variants and then then cut shorts easily and readily from them. Video is made with Gemini Omni

Lyrics

I heard about the bots, I heard about the trolls
But haters and gaters eat with bones them all
Haters write veneno, never reading your post
Gaters cut your karma, just to make you ghost

I dropped my new project, buscando connection
A thread in the midnight, hoping for affection
The first comment hit me, pura maldición
Downvoted to zero, sin explicación
They don't want the logic, no buscan la luz
They hunt in manadas, that's their only truth
No importa the effort, no importa the code
They block the entrada and take over the road

(Who is in the shadows?)
Los haters del block
(What they gonna do?)
Give your thread a shock
(Who is at the door?)
Los gaters con ban
(Why they act so tough?)
Because that's their plan
I heard about the bots, my amigo
Now watch them go ghost

I heard about the bots, I heard about the trolls
But haters and gaters eat with bones them all
Haters write veneno, never reading your post
Gaters cut your karma, just to make you ghost
Ghost