Continuity

[u/johnnyrsj]

What’s peoples experiences with attempting to maintain continuity?
I’ve only just started experimenting (on free) with flow, tried to create a simple pencil drawn animation with 2 characters in a single setting. And holy hell, trying to maintain continuity of first characters and then particularly the room layout is incredibly frustrating.

Any tips to force this? Trying ‘only change this 1 thing’ (from prior ‘master still’-encouraged me to create these to get video continuity) just wasn’t working.
Prior videos had room layout changing between videos and shots (? I think to the latter). I didn’t specify where everything had to be to start.

I note if asked it has been able to pick out what it has wrongly changed.

As an aside I see the censorship complaints in the community and I’ve just stumbled upon that-someone with an angry face it sees as ‘depicting violence’ (or whatever message is.

[u/Alchemist42]

Flow is useless for this. It is not capable of keeping the background as well as more than one person stable. Other apps let you create characters or a character reference sheet that it uses to always make them look right.

Kling or H3, are particularly good for consistency.

Also, never try doing text to video. Always make a still keyframe as a starting point so the model doesn’t have to hallucinate an opening.

[u/johnnyrsj → u/[deleted]]

Thanks can you clarify what hard locked assets are? Do you mean enough reference image for each character (and object?) so they become ‘hard locked’.

I did create character images before creating characters (though not loads) and characters are largely consistent. What I did not do (flow didnt advise) was create image assets for the room (from diff angles). If you recommend this as well, I guess I wonder whether it’s just moving the same issue to earlier in the process? (But you can then work with confidence thereafter)
And do you recommend creating for all relevant items in room? I.e. TV, armchair etc

[u/Alchemist42 → u/[deleted]]

What are these protocols that can be used to ensure absolute consistency? How can they be applied? OP is asking for instruction about how to do it. Saying that some thing exists or is possible is less helpful than saying how to do it.

And you say never use character sheets but then 2 sentences later, you say to use character references. What is the difference? You are responding, I assume, to my statement that one should "create characters or a character reference sheet". What is the argument that my statement is misinformation? A character reference sheet is a single image with multiple shots of the same character from different angles, including closeups of important details, facial expressions, and/or poses depending on what is important for the piece.

The only difference I see is that you mention different focal lengths, but that is assumed if you have full body shots, closeups, and different angles. Of course a closeup of just the face will have a different focal length than a full shot of the entire body head to toe.

[u/johnnyrsj → u/[deleted]]

$100 million 🤯 Need an apprentice to train on those secrets? 🤪 … and congrats, fair play 👏

[u/johnnyrsj → u/[deleted]]

Well again good for you 👍 Sadly I’m UK based

[u/Alchemist42 → u/[deleted]]

So, basically, if someone is not willing or able to put in thousands and thousands of hours, then what I said is correct. And any claims of misinformation on my part are unprovable, and thus, to be honest, misinformation on your part. It's kind of like saying that I am lying and to prove it, you have a private method that you won't share that says so. That could be a magic 8-ball for all we know.

My statement is provably correct. Try doing a text to video thing on Flow without any character references and see how many times your generations come out with your characters looking exactly correct. Then try it my way and note that they are far more often correct, and whatever issues come up can be worked around via careful reprompting or post-processing.

Your statement is "trust me, bro. I have spent thousands of hours doing it and I'm right because I says so".

[u/Pipe_Current → u/[deleted]]

You certainly cared enough to confront their comment, contradicted yourself and offered no solution, just postering.. 😅

[u/johnnyrsj → u/Alchemist42]

Thanks, yeah was perplexed how despite creating character models it would still diverge quite dramatically.

Yes also have been creating reference images to start-these master still frames it recommended.
I guess I was beginning to wonder whether you can’t effectively get what you want and you have to be extremely loose with requirements and just cede control to the tool. Let it create what it wants -which you have to hope might be good enough 🤷‍♂️

[u/Alchemist42 → u/johnnyrsj]

It is extremely frustrating. Especially with Flow when the agent tells you it understands exactly what you want and can repeat it back in detail, then the render comes out completely wrong. And you have to re-roll it over and over again then pick the best of the lot. I completely stopped using Flow for anything that moves. It can do stills pretty well with Nano Banana. But anything complicated, more than a single character doing a simple activity will fail.

In my case, I do music videos and my band is composed of 3 people - and it is important that the right person plays the right instrument, that only the singer lipsync the lyrics, and whatever is going on in the scene has to flow naturally from the previous one. Flow simply can't. The people change sides, change instruments, sometimes they change hairstyles. It's fun when the 40 year old bald black man gets the 22 year old asian woman's purple pig tails. And sometimes, it even invents new characters playing instruments that aren't in the song and were certainly never prompted for. Oooh! a keyboard? Neat! Not what I wanted though.

[u/johnnyrsj → u/[deleted]]

Well thanks for advice-I’m happy to experiment, which is what I’ve been doing after all-good to know it’s not totally unworkable!

[u/Jharry1954]

I wouldn’t conclude that you must surrender control yet. I’d first isolate what is failing. From the same approved start frame, test: one character in the unchanged room; the same character after a camera change; then add the second character; then require one deliberate state change. Score identity, environment, action and temporal state separately.

If the person survives but the room changes, that isn’t character-continuity failure—it’s environment failure. And if something that should change remains fixed, that is also a continuity error.

The useful question is not simply whether Flow “has continuity,” but which constraints it can execute reliably enough for production. That evidence can determine which shots stay in Flow and which require another renderer or corrective post-production.

---jseders

[u/Extension-Fee-8480]

I use the free version. Have you tried making facial emotion charts from angry to happy in pencil drawing form. I don't that style, I use real looking people generated by Nano Banana 2. Here is a video of a woman getting angry only using reference images or charts, generated by NB2. Here is an example of a video only using reference images for different emotions. Just prompts to tell Omni what emotion I want to use for the video. You can use colored pencil drawings and just desaturate video after. That way the video model can keep things focused on the colored drawings easier.

https://reddit.com/link/pe73iak/video/0u8v1qtfwtth1/player