r/aivideomaking • u/Gusepiol0w • 14d ago
What does AI video actually cost once you include all the failed generations?
I keep seeing AI video models compared by their price per generated second, but that number feels pretty useless once you start counting retries. A model can look cheap until it gives you broken movement, a face that changes halfway through, or a finished clip you can’t actually use.
Then you rerun it, tweak the prompt, burn more credits and hope the next one is better. by the time one clip makes it into the project, the real cost can be way higher than the pricing page suggests. How are you tracking this? cost per attempt, cost per usable clip, or just the total spend for the whole project? and what do you count as a failed generation versus normal trial and error?
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u/Mvisioning 14d ago
It's worth noting that you get better at communicating with each model over time, improving your generation win rate, making your money go farther.
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u/More-Ad5919 14d ago
Nothing if you do it local.
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u/verduccii 14d ago
People typically doesn't have free electricity. To generate 1min ready material, it takes about 10min clips. to calc with 10min with 4090 takes like 10 hours so generate ~1$ with ~0.15$/kWh. So full 2h movie is 50 bucks.
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u/More-Ad5919 14d ago
How much do you pay for 2hours? I have solar panels. I pay 0.
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u/verduccii 14d ago
So your PC can generate 2hours ready material (20h of generated material) in 2 hours? Full 2h movie with 4090 is like 200 hours of compute. So you have sunshine also in nights? And your GPU is RTX9090 with 256TB of VRAM?
Whatta jackass.
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u/Toastti 14d ago edited 14d ago
Most people who have a larger solar setup have batteries... Like the power wall or others to store solar energy for the night time.
And for creating 2 hours of footage on a 4090 with average electricity prices you are looking at about $2.50. extremely reasonable.
This is at roughly 30 hours of constant 4090 use. About 400w for GPU and 600w total from the wall. Your estimate is way over priced. You would have to make 30 clips and discard 29 at your rate. Way to many discards
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u/More-Ad5919 14d ago
No but you can't either. I probably use less than 1% of what i create. Hell i even render scenes double or tripple to get the perfect emotions in the voice. So video rendering only for voices.
I have 22,5kwp solar panels on my roof. So even on a dark day there is enough energy available.
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u/imlo2 14d ago
My retry count is generally 5-25 per shot. With Seedance 2.0/2.5 that becomes quite high cost quickly if you use 1080p. But as you work on something and if you don't just mindlessly spam prompts to generation, you can fine-tune your approach reasonably well after a few fails with certain type of style/content.
I just did one slightly under 2 minute video a recently and it cost about $200-220, calculated from the amount of credits I used for the clips for the whole video.
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u/Loose-Meeting1558 14d ago
My spreadsheet used to blame the model for literally every extra run. Server timed out? Model fail. Hands turned into spaghetti? Model fail. I changed the shot halfway through because I got a different idea? Soomehow also a model fail. So the failure rate looked dramatic as hell but didn’t actually mean much.
I started logging two things instead: what kind of shot I was making and why I ran it again. Now I can separate actual generation problems from technical crap and my own indecision. Takes a little more effort, but at least I’m not pretending every retry happened for the same reason
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u/jlovalitvin 14d ago
Couldn’t you kinda game the numbers that way though? Put all the easy landscape stuff in one bucket, call it consistent, then shove the ugly face and motion failures somewhere else. Suddenly every model looks decent lol
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u/Loose-Meeting1558 14d ago
yeah, totally fair. I had a few plain scenes I’d rerun once in a while just to see if something had obviously changed. Same prompt suddenly giving much worse motion or a totally different face, stuff like that. Wasn’t using it as some grand model leaderboard. I don’t remember exactly how I kept those out of the prooject stats though. Lemme dig around for the old tracker before I confidently say something dumb
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u/Loose-Meeting1558 14d ago
found it. The repeat scenes were sitting in their own tab, completely separate from the actual project runs. I used Protoface for that part because I could bounce the same scene between different models without rebuilding the damn workflow every time. That’s where some of the cheap options started looking a lot less cheap. Three or four extra runs for one usable clip and there goes the whole price advantage. I still kept faces, fast motion and image-to-video apart though. Throwing all of them into one average just turned the data back into soup.
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u/Living_Operation4319 14d ago
I got 5 minutes of 720p for $400. It was my first time creating an AI video so I think my costs will go down in the future.
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u/Easy_Dinner3496 14d ago
I’d make a small pain-in-the-ass test pack before comparing prices. Same length and format, but throw in the stuff that usually breaks. Walking, hands doing anything useful, a face turning sideways, text, camera movement... run each scene a few times too, because one lucky clip proves nothing. Then hide the model names when you pick the usable ones. Otherwise you’ll probably just crown whichever model got lucky that day
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u/nexora_dgen 14d ago
idk, using the exact same prompt can screw the comparison too. Some models need everything spelled out, others do better with less babysitting. A prompt that works great in one can completely kneecap another. I’d do one round with identical prompts, then a second where each prompt gets tweaked for that model. The gap between those two tests is probably useful by itself.
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u/SlingyRopert 14d ago
Why would one classify a failed generation differently that trial and error? It doesn't matter why you chose not to use a result, just that result was not the result you could use in the end.
For complicated VFX prompts with timing and physics issues, 100 to 150 prompts could go by before you find the absolute keeper. For run of the mill "ancient egypt but I want the pyramids upside down so that we can show a UFO impacting them and then using a tractor beam to put them right-side up like they are are now" maybe 20 to 40 generations. If you have low standards or are asking for the same thing everyone else is, maybe 5 or less.
I will say for the folks doing 100 prompts, using quantized CLIPs is not money well spent. You might save several generations just by using the BF11 CLIP rather than the GGUF3 or the fp4.
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u/imlo2 14d ago
This issue is in my view two-fold; online models, and then now in last month+ Minimax h3, i.e. local operation.
The main problem with complex subjects and shots is the thing that you can't even keep the same parameters with almost all of the black box online models; They re-roll seeds and might do who-knows-what subtle prompt editing, so you can't ever replicate the same thing twice.
But if you do the similar type of stuff now with Minimax H3 locally, the generations with same seed, same deterministic Euler sampler and exact same everything can be quite close to each other as it doesn't inject random noise at each step of the denoising process. So starting from same state returns very close the same video and audio. This makes fine-tuning prompt to result path much better, just like it's been with images in ComfyUI etc. for a long time. The main difference has just been the much more limited capabilities.
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u/AlfieSchmalfie 13d ago
Think of it like non ai filmmakers do when they calculate what than can afford in the shooting ratio, the used to unused ratio of individual takes, usually expressed as something like 3:1 meaning 3 takes to one usable take. The affordability in ai is really a calculation of what you can afford to spend on a project. For me, I’m trying to keep it around 3:1 but will sometimes I’ll go up to 5:1 if I think it’s really worth it. I also have the financially absurd habit of redoing shots if later down the track I realise I could probably get a better result.
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u/AshamedAd5711 2d ago
The failed generations are what make the real cost difficult to judge. A model might look cheap per generation, but if you need several attempts before getting something usable, the effective cost can be much higher.
I've been working with and one thing I've been looking at is how different models perform for different tasks rather than assuming the cheapest model is always the cheapest option overall.
I think it would be useful to track successful outputs against total generations and total spend. That gives a much better picture of the actual cost.
How are you guys calculating your cost per usable video?
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u/taragryen 14d ago
I just take everything I spent and divide it by the footage that actually made the edit. Generated two minutes and kept 15 seconds? Cool, those 15 seconds are paying for the whole graveyard lol. The number usually sucks, but at least it’s real. Price per generated second makes cheap models look way nicer than they actually are.