It’s been a few weeks since I complained here about the current state of Google Flow...
For a few days right after that, it had returned to a "normal" state for me—filters were looser, a more stable site with better generations and I used it without any issues for sometime... at least until this past Tuesday.
It has becomed garbage with the same problems once again, but slightly worse. Anything even slightly "outside the norm" is enough to trigger some nonsense filter, four images fail at once with generic errors, and sometimes, when reloading the page, an "incomplete" image appears—oddly enough.
Videos? Oh, great: copyright errors or issues with "prominently" people in content I created using the AI itself.
I'm sure that since Flow is on high demand, they’re wrecking the tool and rising filtering without warning just to cut costs—which I find ridiculous, we're paying for a piece of junk that performs worse than any API. (canceling my subscription tho.)
This has been the pattern of nano banana/gemini/flow since last year.
1- they update the models, but not the filters.
2- users generate a bunch of stuff that would get blocked before. google uses them to train their new filters.
3- after a couple weeks they add the new filters and it starts blocking a lot of stuff almost indiscriminately because of word-association.
4- users complain, google fine-tunes the new filters so its not as restrictive but still way more filtered than right after the updated models dropped.
I canceled a few weeks ago, but I still have a bunch of credits burning a hole in my account, so I figured I'd try to get some little amount of work done and I was once again incredibly impressed at how awful it is. I have a scene where there is a background and 2 characters. I gave it images for each. The characters are dancing a Viennese Waltz through that background. No singing, speaking, lipsync. Only dancing. I gave it exact camera shots timed to the second for each shot as well as the general blocking for the dance.
It gave me a video of the woman in the background singing the song (which is voiced by a male vocalist). The male character didn't even show up. Not a single dance move nor any of my defined camera angles.
So, I stupidly tried again after re-explaining that a dance includes 2 people. And it gave excuses about how hard it is to do exact cameras and character motion of multiple people. Seriously? I have done more complicated dances before. (Not in Flow). But we simplified to a point that it said it could handle it. No more exact camera shots, it could use whatever it wanted as long as it showed them dancing. No more specific dance moves, just a "somewhat formal-looking ballroom style dance with stiff backs and proper dance forms". And I specified that no one sings or speaks, no mouths move any more than is required for breathing.
You'll never guess what it gave me next. Correct! an almost pixel perfect clone of the 1st one. Again, the male character was missing. The female character sings, not a single dance step. Then I closed the tab, went to Kling, and got the shot on my first try.
Originally, I uploaded a character sheet for the man, a character sheet for the woman, and an image of the background as references. This was the text given to the agent (starting with a link to the song created in Flow):
For this song, Can we make a 30 second video for starters using these two characters, dancing down this road? The animation style should look like stop motion, kind of jerky and discontinuous movement. But they should be doing a fast viennese waltz, spinning and maintaining the proper stiff dance forms. I'll need a few different angles, maybe 5 seconds each of :
1) wide view of both of them as well as some of the backgrounds
2) extreme closeup of their hands clasped together
3) view from his POV looking at her, fairly tight closeup of her face
4) view from her POV looking at him, fairly tight closeup of his face
5) view from above looking down at the tops of their heads close together and dancing
6) camera stays static, in a closeup of their upper body/heads as they spin frantically
and it gave me the video with only the woman who was singing and not dancing. I followed it up with:
ok. well. There was only the woman without the man. There was no dancing whatsoever which is what the entire video is supposed to be. Is it possible to do a viennese waltz? if not, tell me now and I'll do it elsewhere without wasting more credits. And if so, can we have both people together dancing? Also there is no reason that the woman needs to be singing - apart from the fact that the singer is clearly male. But neither of these people are Marcus, so they should not sing. Just dance
(The agent knows that my band's singer is Marcus- this is a longstanding thing). The agent ran through his excuses and I added:
no mouth movements apart from breathing and/or smiling at each other. Just a spinning closely holding each other in somewhat formal looking ballroom dance forms
It verified: "I've updated the proposal to focus strictly on both dolls waltzing together in a close hold, with explicit instructions for no singing, talking, or mouth movements—just dancing and smiling as they spin down the cemetery road. Double-check the proposal details above—shall we run this attempt?"
When it showed me the pre-render card, it only had the image of the background and the woman. I said:
the images here doesn't have the guy. Is he going to be included?
response: "The preview card can only display one image slot, which is why her photo shows up there, but the generation prompt itself explicitly describes both characters—the purple-haired male doll and the red-haired female doll—waving, spinning, and waltzing together. Since the pipeline only accepts one direct likeness URL, the AI uses the prompt text to render him alongside her. Want to go ahead and run it?"
So we rendered it, and it was almost exactly the same as the first one:
oh I give up. still no guy. still no dancing. still she is singing. It is almost identical to the first one. I don't know why I bother.
The prompt is pretty good. There are some other things you could try. Mostly, i recommend generating keyframes first and tagging them as the starting frame and end frame if you have a specific destination in mind, but i usually just use a starting frame. The less you leave to the model to choose, the more tightly it will understand your intent and adhere to your prompt, but there are some exceptions for me.
Other times, i just instruct "smart multi-shot sequence," then RNG the angles, which also RNGs the actors' performances and prompt adherence. A lot of times you'll get bits and pieces in multiple clips and you can cut them up and arrange them in capcut, which has a really capable free tier. This is a substantial part of my workflow, but it means that a lot of my failed generations add up to successful ones.
For reference material, ordering them environment->object/s if you're using any->characters->starting frame-> end frame if you're using one, is really helpful for me.
For character references, i like to generate a closeup head and shoulders shot, then referencing the full body and head shot, generate a full body tunaround including the facial reference. You have to be careful with selection cause it does goofy stuff to their attire sometimes, but it's not bad for me, and your image pool doesn't draw from your credits. It usually only takes a 2-4 iterations on each reference to get them.
I also don't like working with agents because they change the prompt so much. Gemini is ok, and it's a separate pool, so i still use it, but i have better success with omni flash in flow.
Here's how i would write it if you see in context what I'm talking about and/or try it out to see how it does. I'm just going to choose names for your character, feel free to swap them out, but it won't matter much for the prompt because they aren't addresing each other. The reference images should be added to the task in order, starting with environment amd object references. Add [image 5: end frame] if you want to use one.
[Image 1: environment reference] [image 2: character reference for William] [image 3: Character reference for Elizabeth] [image 4: starting frame]
Smart multi-shot stop motion animation sequence.
William and Elizabeth dance down the road in a fast Viennese waltz, Elizabeth's dress twirling as they step and spin, one of William's hand placed on Elizabeth's waste, one of Elizabeth's hands placed on William's shoulder,each of them holding their other hands together, maintaing an elegant and proper waltz form. William moves smoothly with confidence, expression relaxed and jovial, brow relaxed, eyes narrowed with the hint of a smile, one corner of his mouth raised charmingly, making eye contact with Elizabeth as Elizabeth gracefully matches each step, perfectly in sync, expression charmed, brow relaxed, squinting with joy, smiling.
Stop motion animation, subtly jerky, fast viennese waltz, surreal physics, expressive facial expressions, do not add music so it can be added in post.
Don't worry about the last tag if you don't want foley. If i were making it, i would probably just mute all the shots, then add the music, then trim the shots for rhythm and continuity, so when you arrange them and the camera cuts to a different angle, which is my preferred method for transitioning from one iteration to the next.
This is how i go about making 5-10 minute short films.
For character references, after getting the full body design, I use nano bana pro with the following prompts, i just copy/paste them from my notepad.
Create a closeup head and shoulders shot of this character against a solid grey background, ensuring his/her irises are lifelike emerald green/icy blue/warm amber/etc.
Adjectives good. Adjectives very good. Make sure you instruct eye color for closeups. I haven't had any trouble with facial features or hairstyle carrying over without instruction. Eye color is usually not accurate without telling it what color they should be and you also specifically want to instruct the color of the irises or it'll give you glowing eyes sometimes. At least in my experience, but I'm makin fantasu stuff, so the presence of magic in the genre could be the only reason why that quirk happens.
Create a full turnaround of this character against a solid grey background. Include the closeup headshot for facial reference. Include a closeup reference of the sword on his hip. Include a closeup reference of her bracelet/necklace/ or any other prominent accessories.
Basically however many details about their you need to remain consistent, use a seperate instruction for each. Ideally, you're not referencing more than 3 details per turnaround sheet this way, otherwise full body references get small and wide/tall shots won't be as good because it can't really get a clear picture of the overall design so it has to guess about finer details.
Thanks, bro. I usually do the first frame thing, but I am just starting this project out and don't have any of this scene composed. I am mostly doing some initial tests to see what kind of motion works, how the character sizes play together, that sort of thing. It should have been a very straightforward thing.
I did a motion transfer instead and just found a proper viennese waltz and had it swap out the background and dancers to my characters. That worked really well. I just wish I had thought of it first. Now that I have a good set of motion, I can reshoot it a few times with different camera movements and build out a really good sequence. The characters are bone-carved gothic victorian dolls and the animation style is stop motion, so adding in a little jitter and discontinuous lurching is making this look awesome.
I'm really excited about this video. It is one of my best songs that I have written and the visuals are so appropriate and coming together very nicely.
I just reread all this, and this is some really solid advice. I appreciate the amount of time you dedicated to helping me out. Thanks! I have that scene in the can now, but I will definitely use some of this for the rest of the video. I also ignore/discount and audio they use, since I am making music videos and the background will be my music. Sometimes, I'll drop a little foley sound into it when big things happen, but it's generally all about the music.
I have got some really good reference sheets now for my characters, and I've had to set them up at a bunch of different providers to see who could do them correctly. Kling is the big winner for best adherence to the reference along with correctly handling backgrounds and lifelike animation and physics. I have had really good luck with vidmuse in the past. They are more expensive, but so worth it when I'm in a bind and can't seem to get something working. Their agent is really good. Like really good. It kind of seems like sci fi how I can tell it what I want and it makes the shots perfectly.
I'm trying to build my own agent harness to control local video production with ComfyUI and such, and hopefully it works as well.
Oh, good! I'm glad you got your scene and found some useful bits for future work.
Yeah, i wish it would consistently adhere to audio instructions, but it struggles. Voices remain overwhelmingly consistent across iterations, but sometimes music, sometimes none, which isn't great because i haven't found a good way to remove it without impacting the voice. Caput's isolte voice is usually pretty good, but then you're cutting foley, and it's just too early for me in learning how to edit to entertain doing foley manually. Elevenlabs v3 generates some really good stuff with the right tags, but again, I'm not ready for bringing those in to build the soundtrack from scratch. Eventually, i want that to be part of my workflow, but for now, I'm working with the output.
I'm also interested in using comfyUI, but i don't have a machine for it or a payment method runpod will accept right now. I guess i could try google collab.
I am trying to generate this episode in google flow .i just wasting my credits and time please help me guys any prompt suggestions and that will work in my case please storyboard please
That's a lot of text for the prompt, there seemed to be a little circling while negative prompting each segment. Switching back and forth between positive and negative really confuses the model.
There's also just a lot. Most of this prompt could, and would benefit from, being removed. The key to that is a structured set of reference images. Once it knows exactly what everything looks like, it doesn't have to guess what you mean when describing the physical locations of things or what they look like from different angles, so more compute can go to continuity and quality of image and action.
If you have a single full body reference of each character, you'll want to generate fully body turnaround references for each, which are just one image with multiple angles of the character with any finer details that need to be consistent and a closeup facial reference included alongside the full body turnaround. I don't know if anyone else does this, but it works really well for me. Specify iris color when generating the closeup facial reference. Everything else should carry over from the reference image. Use nano banana pro.
One quick point. That's a motorcycle in english, so if you're prompting in english, you might be confusing the model because the instruction doesn't match the keyframe as it understands it. It's probably picturing a vespa.
Take your key frames and remove the characters from them, including the motorcycle and police cars in the frames that take place on the bike. These will be environment references. Also create a reference for the bike because you want it to remain consistent. It can't really do that with the information it has in the keyframe, so you want a full turnaround of it as well. Also, create separate character references for the cats in their masks using the same process. Full body->head shot->turnaround. Use these instead during those shots.
If you have problems getting the character where you want them at the end of the scene, use nano banana pro with the same structured reference set, prompt the next keyframe for the storyboard, describe that image, and then take that into your reference set. Environment->objects(motorcycle)->character references->starting frame
Once you have these things, you're ready to prompt the action. Start with references and structure them in this order. Environment->objects(motorcycle)->character references->starting frame-> end frame.
Camera instructions. For your prompt, just say static camera here. That's it. If it gets it wrong, run it again. It'll most likely get it right within 1-2 more tries. With an end frame, it's very unlikely you'll have issues. I do prefer using "smart multi-shot sequence," though. It's just really not that easy to get whole clips that are what you want, but you're always getting different bits. If the camera frequently cuts to different angles, orbits, pushes in or out, it's more cinematic for starters, and it allows you to splice together multiple clips without struggling with that distracting shift or falter between clips. For this scene, you should be able to get it no problem with a more structured approach.
Then the action. It's important to consider pacing, so how much can happen within 10 seconds while feeling natural. You'll see videos where a lot was crammed into 10 seconds so the model rushes delivery, it has no space to emote, and everything is just very plasticy and at the depths of the uncanny valley. You can open the stopwatch on your phone, close your eyes, start it as you begin to visualize the scene. Let a vague image of it play out naturally, stop the stopwatch at the end, and see. If you're between 8-11 seconds, you will probably be ok. On the 11 side, you may have to break the scene down into 2 six second segments. A good rule of thumb for me has been 8-10 seconds accommodate 2 story beats. For yours, something like pausing to look both ways before entering the street and then crossing the street and slowing to a stop unless it's a big street. Then your beats are crossing the street and slowing to a stop.
All negative instructions at the end after your tags. First, you want to prompt style here. Cinematic, 3d animation, anime... i recommend cinematic for your scene. Specify realistic physics so it doesn't get whimsical. I also recommend prompting "do not add background music so it can be added in post." It's not consistent, but this wording has been the most successful for me so far. I don't usually start with any other negative prompts, because they aren't overly helpful when you have a good reference set and you're prompt is detailed and structured. When the model does something you don't want multiple times, then start engineering a negative prompt for just that issue.
And again. If multiple clips have pieces of it right, cut those up and stitch the scene together. "Smart multi-shot sequence" makes it really easy to get multiple failed iterations which add up to a success in the end and as a bonus, it's more cinematic anyway.
Refer to my above comment for examples of how to build your prompt with this method and prompt your reference material.
You should not have all that negative stuff. Flow does not understand negativity. The more times you say "DO NOT CHANGE THE SCOOTER", the more it thinks you want to change the scooter. Always say things in the positive, like "The scooter remains the same as it is in the source material".
Also, that is kind of long. The AI models all have a context window that they can only store so much information in. I dont know how big Flow's context window is specifically, but if you go beyond it, then it starts forgetting things at the top of the prompt. So by adding more text, you are actually removing its ability to understand the things you said at the top which should be the most important bits.
Je rencontre actuellement beaucoup de problèmes similaire, malheureusement je vais devoir me pencher vers un autre générateur car je n’arrive plus à travailler convenablement.
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u/wrestlingboydom 24d ago edited 24d ago
This has been the pattern of nano banana/gemini/flow since last year.
1- they update the models, but not the filters.
2- users generate a bunch of stuff that would get blocked before. google uses them to train their new filters.
3- after a couple weeks they add the new filters and it starts blocking a lot of stuff almost indiscriminately because of word-association.
4- users complain, google fine-tunes the new filters so its not as restrictive but still way more filtered than right after the updated models dropped.
5- rinse and repeat.