A lot is a shot list. You describe what you want made, the studio plans the beats, and you end up with a numbered list of shots, each one a prompt, a length, a model and its references. Nothing has rendered. Nothing has been charged.
That gap is the most useful thing to understand about this product, so it is worth stating plainly before anything else.
Creating a lot never spends money.
Planning, creating, attaching references, choosing a model and pricing the whole thing are all free. Money moves when you render a shot or render a lot, and nowhere else. You can build a campaign for twelve products, read every shot, price it exactly, change your mind and walk away, having spent nothing.
Pick the room you are working in
Six studios plan six different things. They are not six templates over one engine, each asks for different inputs because each is making a different kind of thing.
| Studio | Reach for it when |
|---|---|
| Marketing Studio | Product in, shot list out. You supply the product; it supplies the ad shape |
| UGC Factory | The script is the ad. One person, one room, one phone, and it needs a face, not a description of one |
| Explainer | The script is the spine. It structures the argument; the lines are yours to write |
| Photodump | One person, a whole camera roll. Stills that read as one day |
| Influencer | A person who does not exist, cast on purpose. A held likeness you keep, not a model you train |
Give it something real to work from
The single largest difference between a lot that works and one that does not is whether the product is in the workspace or merely described in a sentence.
Paste a product URL and the extractor reads the page, name, summary, selling points, price, photography. Save it, and every later lot starts from something rather than from blank. More importantly, the saved product’s photography gets attached to each shot as a reference, and that is the thing that actually holds one bottle across four clips. A prompt saying “the bottle” renders a different bottle every time.
Reading a product page covers what the extractor takes and what it will not invent.
Four things compose, and they do not compete
A lot is composed rather than typed. Four choices stack, each answering a different question, and none of them overrules the others by accident.
| Choice | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Format or structure | What the piece IS, how many shots and what each one does |
| Vertical | What it is FOR, the category, and what that category needs |
| Capture style | What the camera IS, who was holding it |
| Look | How it is GRADED, the film stock, the light, the palette |
You will not usually set all four. Anything you pass wins; anything you leave out, the vertical fills in. That is what a vertical is for.
The two things worth checking before you render
A lot arrives priced, and the number is one take of every shot. Before you turn that into a charge, two checks catch most of what goes wrong.
1. Read the shots back
The brief shows every shot with the settings that decide its cost, which ones are ready, which are waiting on another shot, and which cannot render at all. It also does something no other view does: a shot whose model will hand back a different length, shape or resolution than it asked for says so on a line of its own.
That matters because the price you are shown is the price of what will actually be made. A shot written for seven seconds, on a model that renders four, six or eight, is quoted for eight, and the brief is where you find that out rather than discovering it in the delivery.
2. Check the references actually attached
A reference count of zero on a shot that was supposed to carry your product is the failure that costs a real take: the render succeeds, it looks fine, and the thing you were selling is not in it. An empty error list is not proof that anything attached, the count is.
Then render one shot
Not the lot. One shot, on the model you picked, and look at it. The expensive mistake in this product is not choosing a bad model; it is applying a bad model to six shots at once. One take answers the question no capability list can, which is whether it looks right.
Everything a lot holds is re-renderable on its own, so a single wrong shot is a single wrong shot. That is the whole reason a lot is a list.
Where the money is, one more time.
Rendering a shot and rendering a lot spend. The fixes that work on a take you already have, restyling it, editing an object, upscaling, generative reframing, spend too, and two of them are free. Everything else in this software, including every way of asking what something will cost, is free.