Cost questions the ledger can answer with arithmetic

A question belongs here when published rates plus arithmetic settle it. Anything that needs a quote, a negotiation or a benchmark run is out of scope, however often it is asked. As of 2026-09-12.

Fig. 1 The retake ratio is the reason the middle branch stays empty: no vendor publishes how many seconds are discarded per usable second.

That rules out the questions people most want answered — which tool is cheapest for a particular job, whether a rate is worth paying, how many retakes a budget survives. Retakes in particular are the hidden multiplier: a per-second rate says nothing about how many seconds get thrown away.

What remains is still worth writing down. Rates that look close per second diverge sharply over a ten-episode series, and the direction of the divergence depends on resolution rules that are easy to miss in a pricing grid.

Every answer shows its working. The rates it used are linked to the channel pages they came from, and the channel pages link to the vendor pricing page behind them, so a disputed total can be traced to the sentence it rests on.

1The questions

The cheapest second — The floor of the published range has dropped to a cent a second, and it sits on a speed-tuned variant rather than on a low resolution.
Credits vs dollars — Three channels here price in credits rather than currency, and one of them publishes a conversion rate that changes with pack size.
What it excludes — Compositing, regeneration and the clip ceiling all change what an episode costs, and none of them is inside the per-second figure.
Conditional prices — One channel halves its rate off-peak, which makes its published figure two figures and complicates every comparison it appears in.
Paying for pixels — Inside a single channel, moving up the resolution ladder multiplies the per-second rate by one and a half to five times, and the ladders differ in shape.
A minute, costed — Multiplying published rates out to a minute puts the channels between well under a dollar and twenty-five dollars, before any regeneration.
Who publishes — Eleven of the sixteen rated tools put a per-second figure in public.
Clip ceilings — Two channels publish a clip ceiling beside their rates, one of them per tier.
Expiry — Six vendors, five published answers about unused credits and one pricing FAQ that raises the question without answering it.
Concurrency — Concurrency is sold as a line item by one vendor, fixed per package by another, and set per membership tier, with a figure for each, by a third.
One model, four prices — One model family publishes four per-second figures plus a tier that halves them all, and the spread runs from five cents to seventy.
Ceilings left off — Five reseller channels print a per-second figure and no maximum length for one generation.
What a failure costs — One price page in this register states that a failure is not charged.
Priced by the clip — Four channels here meter a whole clip or a run of minutes, and the cost per second inside those figures is not constant.
Both halves published — Three channels print a credit rate and the price of a credit beside it.
Strings attached — Six channels print a condition beside the rate: two discounts a buyer can reach, two warnings that the figure moves, two commitments.
Reseller or source — A reseller is not reliably dearer than the maker.
Asked, not answered — Two pages raise credit rollover in their own FAQ and leave it open.
Parallel generation — Only four channels say anything about parallel generation.
Length in minutes — Two channels here measure output in minutes rather than seconds, and the unit turns out to be a reliable marker of what is being sold.
Credits with no price — On two credit-metered pages a credit's price divides out of published plans.
Who built the model — Nine of the sixteen priced channels made what they price.
Fixing a clip — Three channels price an edit to a clip that already exists.
Draft then finish — Two channels document a cheap draft pass and a full-resolution take.
Before paying — Four channels publish a free starting allowance, counted in credits, videos or named items.
Paying yearly — A yearly plan is one payment, but channels differ on whether a year of credits lands at once, month by month, or resets each cycle.
Price of sound — Some price lists charge a third or double for audio; one model charges nothing extra; one channel folds speech into the tier and scores episodes for free.
Price of a reference — Some channels charge per reference attached to a call, some let a few through free, and one sells generated character sheets with an allowance per account.
Remaking a clip — Video-to-video bills the source by the second, above the text rate.
Waiting time — Most price pages sell speed as a word: faster, fastest, a priority queue.

Where the ledger cannot answer, the page says so and names what a vendor would have to publish for the answer to exist.

Elsewhere on the ledger: Channels, Ratings, Unpriced, Price shapes, What each channel publishes, One model, several sellers, Single ratings, Terms, Learn, Data. How a figure earns a line is set out on the method page.

2Inside a generated second

Price aside, what goes into the seconds behind “Questions” is described in SceneMixer's guides:

SceneMixer turns a novel into a watchable short-drama series in one pipeline: upload the novel (Chinese or English) → AI extracts characters, scenes, and an episode-by-episode structure → generates consistent character and scene art → writes storyboard scripts → renders video segment by segment (16:9 by default, 9:16 in one setting) → composites full episodes.
SceneMixer, Turn a Novel into a Video Series with AI (read 2026-10-13)

The longest an episode may run: 240 seconds for Short Drama, 300 for TV Series, none for Film.
SceneMixer, Short Drama, TV Series or Film — “What is the episode cap?” (read 2026-10-13)