The operational companion to intent-vs-precision.md: every generation has a finite fidelity budget, and a prompt that demands everything gets mediocrity everywhere. Decide where the budget goes before writing a word. Labels: [field] = practitioner-reported · [heuristic] = default to test. Craft guidance compiled 2026-06-11; no platform-availability claims.
Identity fidelity, motion boldness, and scene density compete for the same generation budget. The known fragile areas — detail stability, multi-subject consistency, text rendering, facial micro-acting — are where overdrawn budgets fail first. A shot that needs a perfect face, a backflip, a crowded market, and a spoken line in one call will land none of them cleanly.
| Spend | What it buys | What it strains |
|---|---|---|
| Identity fidelity | stable faces, products, logos, costumes | motion range; every bold move risks drift |
| Motion boldness | committed action, physics, choreography | close-up identity detail, especially faces and hands |
| Scene density | crowds, layered environments, weather, props | per-subject stability; tiny background detail degrades |
- Name the primary spend — the one thing this shot is for. One per generation.
- Pick one secondary; economize everything else on purpose.
- Offload fidelity to references: identity carried by
[Image1]is budget the text no longer spends, freeing prose for motion and timing. - Pay for the primary out of the others: bold motion buys down facial detail, so stage emotion in the body and ration close-ups; dense scenes buy down subject precision, so keep hero subjects large in frame and few in number.
- Re-anchor across a series: chained generations drift, so respend on identity (original references, not outputs) every few clips.
| Shot | Primary | Secondary | Economized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product ad | product identity (ref-anchored) | one material motion beat | scene density, crowd, weather |
| Dance / action | motion boldness (donor [Video1]) |
identity via [Image1] re-anchor |
facial close-ups, set dressing |
| Establishing world shot | scene density and atmosphere | camera move | character identity (no close subjects) |
| Dialogue close-up | facial stability (locked camera) | the spoken line | motion, background activity |
| If the shot needs | It pays with |
|---|---|
| Bold motion and a close-up face | choose one; put the emotion in posture and staging, or cut to a separate close-up shot |
| Many subjects | per-subject identity precision; pick one hero and let the rest read as shapes |
| Readable on-screen text | nothing — move text to post |
| A crowded frame and a tiny product detail | the detail; isolate the product beat in its own shot |
For sequence projects, allocate the current clip before allocating the full story. The full story owns objective and final outcome; the current clip owns one action, one endpoint, and the continuity locks needed for the next handoff. Future beats are not part of the current prompt budget.
- What is this shot for — identity, motion, or world?
- Which references carry fidelity so the text does not have to?
- What is deliberately economized, and is that written as a constraint?
- If the answer to 1 is "all three," which beats split into separate shots or generations?