After the credit price hike and the shrinking of membership credits, a two-minute clip, in the ideal case with zero failed takes, went from a bit over five yuan to forty yuan.

I submitted nineteen tasks at once, over a thousand credits. Forty-eight hours later they were all stuck in the queue, neither rendering nor cancelable, with the credits frozen.

At peak hours one task waited over ten hours and then failed. Redoing it meant queuing all over again; the whole day was gone.

Paid sixty-nine for membership; videos failed repeatedly and credits were still taken. I had nine hundred-plus credits, but support insisted my member credits were gone. Refund talks failed.

I only gave it a character and a background, and it came up with a whole tech-style concept itself, saving me a long prompt. The catch: it picks the style itself, not necessarily the direction I wanted.

With reference images, character identity and scene continuity beat text-only prompts by a lot. Across shots you still weed out bad takes yourself and stitch them in post.

I spent two days testing character consistency and shot replication. All-round reference takes character, scene and motion material at once, and handles camera moves and long takes. Ready for real short-film work.