Built in the open
What we shipped, what's next, and what broke along the way.
Every release, written down the day it goes out — named for the date it shipped. The backlog is here too, so directors know what their crew can do this week and what is still being built.
2026.09.24.3 · shipped Sep 24, 2026
221 changes across 24 releases
2026.09.24.3Sep 24, 2026PatchSep 24, 2026
Tell the Telegram bot how to behave#
The bot now keeps what you tell it about its manner — shorter answers, no preamble, English in this chat — and tells a remark about itself apart from a wish, a fault or a correction.
NewTelegram**Tell the bot how to behave, and it remembers.** *Keep it shorter*, *don't start with “Looking in the documentation”*, *answer in English in this chat* — the bot keeps it, and a line under its answer says what it kept and for whom. A rule for yourself or for your chat holds at once; a rule for everyone goes to a studio admin, who accepts, rewords or declines it in **Settings → Telegram**. It keeps only what you ask of it from now on, in your own words: a wish for something new still goes on the feedback portal, a fault in the bot is still a ticket, and a correction of a fact never becomes a rule.
2026.09.24.2Sep 24, 2026PatchSep 24, 2026
The Telegram bot speaks when spoken to#
In a group chat the bot now answers only the messages meant for it — a mention, or a reply to one of its messages — and every conversation it has is kept where the studio's staff can read it back.
ImprovedTelegram**The bot answers only when you talk to it.** In a group it used to answer every message, people talking to each other included. Now it answers a message that mentions it, a reply to one of its own messages, and its commands (**/id**, **/help**, **/problem**); everything else it leaves alone. To answer a question it asked you, reply to that question. In a direct message every message is still for it.
NewTelegram**Every conversation with the bot is kept.** **Settings → Telegram → Conversations** shows what was asked, what the bot answered, the ticket or post each answer made, what it looked up in the production to get there, and why an answer failed when one did. A ticket filed from Telegram links to the conversation it came from on the support desk. Messages in a group that were not addressed to the bot are neither read nor kept.
FixedTelegram**A busy chat is no longer told it has gone quiet.** The message the bot writes after a day of silence now counts everyone's messages, not only the ones sent to it, and says how to reach it.
2026.09.24Sep 24, 2026ReleaseSep 24, 2026
Fedor Lyass joins the camera department#
A second Seedance DoP, built from a real cinematographer's own account of how he works — and the DoP you cast now shapes the shots themselves. Every agent in the crew has a page of its own.
NewCrew**Fedor Lyass, Director of Photography.** A second DoP on the Seedance pipeline, whose method comes from the cinematographer Fedor Lyass in his own words — his forty-five answers to the studio's cinematographer survey. He arrives without a house style: the scene decides colour and framing, the light is natural by default, the camera goes handheld when a scene is raw, and no shot is made just in case. Pick him for the DoP seat on **Cast your crew**. A new reel still starts on Juno Park.
ImprovedShot list**The DoP you cast now shoots differently.** Until today the choice of DoP changed the video editor and how the agent spoke in the chat, but not the shots. Now the DoP a reel cast breaks every scene into shots in their own manner and writes the Seedance prompts the same way, so two reels with different DoPs come out shot differently. A reel with no DoP cast works as before.
NewCrew**Every agent has a page.** **Profile ↗** beside each seat on **Cast your crew** opens that agent in a new tab: who they are, what the seat does in the studio, their method and rules, and where the method comes from — without losing the choices made so far.
FixedTimeline**The role filter closes when you click away** and opens downwards, instead of covering the Analyze banner.
FixedHelp**The studio tour points at the right thing on every step.** The highlight no longer lingers on the previous step's control, and the steps whose target was missing now find it.
2026.09.23.3Sep 23, 2026PatchSep 23, 2026
You can watch the screenplay being read#
The processing window counts the model's tokens and shows what it is writing again, instead of waiting in silence for a stage to finish.
FixedBreakdown**The processing window shows the model at work again.** For the past few days a stage showed nothing until it was done — no token count, no text, just “Waiting for the model to start streaming…” — which on a feature's first stage lasts a quarter of an hour and looks like nothing is happening. The token counter and the live text move again as the model writes, and on a long script the bar ticks forward as each scene is read. In the minute or two before its first word, while the model reads the screenplay and thinks, the window says how much it has read instead of looking stuck.
2026.09.23.2Sep 23, 2026PatchSep 23, 2026
A full screenplay reads to the end#
The breakdown no longer gives up on a feature-length script, a reel you create gets its crew again, and stopping Analyze all no longer leaves a scene half read.
FixedBreakdown**A full-length screenplay now reads to the end.** For the past few days only short test scripts finished their breakdown: reading a feature takes one long pass that can run a quarter of an hour, and each stage was cut off at fifteen minutes. A stage now has two hours. A stage that ran longer than five minutes also stops showing as interrupted while it is still working.
NewBreakdown**A breakdown that stopped says so, and picks up where it stopped.** If a stage cannot finish (the account paying for the model runs out of credit, or it is still going after two hours), the timeline reads **The breakdown stopped at** that stage and offers **Continue breakdown**. Every stage already read is kept. The Director's card in the chat now reports the same thing, even if no tab was open when the run stopped.
FixedReel**Cast your crew is back after uploading a screenplay.** For the past few days a new reel skipped the page where each seat gets its agent and went straight to the studio with no crew at all — so there was no way to give it the Seedance DoP or the references-only Production Designer, and it ran on the defaults whatever you meant. Creating a reel opens that page again, and **Open studio** goes on to the breakdown's estimate as before.
FixedScene analysis**Stop after this one now finishes the scene in progress.** It used to cut the running scene off halfway: its shots were saved and paid for, its brief never ran, and nothing said it was incomplete. Now the scene finishes, brief included, and only the ones after it are dropped. Press **Analyze all** again to carry on. A dropped connection mid-scene (a laptop that went to sleep, a train tunnel) no longer ends the run either: the studio checks what was saved and keeps going.
NewPlatform**Surveys that are answered out loud.** The studio can send a cinematographer a personal link to a survey about how they work. No account is needed. While they tick their answers, the page records the screen they share and their voice, so every answer comes back with the reason spoken aloud. Staff create and revoke links under **Settings → Surveys**, and when reviewing a response, clicking an answer plays the recording from the moment it was ticked.
2026.09.23Sep 23, 2026ReleaseSep 23, 2026
Every request reaches one desk, with a clock on it#
Whichever way you reach the studio — the portal, the “?” button, the forms, the bot — your request lands in one place, says which door it came through, and carries a deadline: six hours if it blocks you, a day otherwise.
NewSupport**Every request now reaches the board, and says where it came from.** A post on the feedback portal, the ? button with its screen recording, the form in your profile, the contact form on the site, a report dictated to the bot in Telegram — all five arrive as cards in the same inbox, tagged with the door they came through and carrying everything the studio recorded: who, from where, on which page, with the recording and the chat. Until now only the portal's posts were published; the other four stopped at the support desk.
NewSupport**And each one carries a deadline.** A report you send as Critical is answered within six hours; everything else within a day — counted from the moment you pressed send, not from when somebody got to it. The urgency you chose travels with the request as its priority, so the queue is worked in the order you meant.
ImprovedSupport**The support desk shows the clock.** Every ticket says which door it came through, how long is left before its deadline — or how far past it is — and links straight to its card on the studio board; a request whose card never got made can be sent again from the desk instead of waiting for the night.
FixedSupport**A message from the contact form is no longer filed as if it came from inside the studio.** It arrives as what it is — a note from the site — and is answered on the same clock as everything else.
NewPlatform**The studio walks itself every night.** Every screen in the building — the public pages, your reels, the windows over the timeline, the desks — is opened as a real account, photographed, and read for what failed while it drew. By morning the studio's staff have one page, **Self-audit**, saying which screens came up broken, empty or slow and which of them is worth an evening; beside it, what the round thinks is worth building next, each idea standing on a number the studio already keeps. The walk only looks: it renders nothing, sends nothing, and leaves every production exactly as it found it.
2026.09.22Sep 22, 2026ReleaseSep 22, 2026
The studio answers in Telegram#
A bot that knows the documentation by heart, reads your production when it is asked in a chat you trust, and takes a bug report by talking instead of by form.
NewHelp**The studio is now in Telegram.** Ask the bot anything you would type into the question box on /docs — how a window works, whose key pays for a render, what a delete takes with it — and it answers in the language you asked in, with a link to the section it read. It answers that much anywhere it has been added.
NewHelp**In a chat your studio has connected, it also reads the production.** Scenes, shot list, cast, art, departments, and the renders that failed — so *why did shot 12 not come out* is a question it goes and looks up rather than deflects. Say which film once with **/project**, or let an admin pin the chat to a production and never say it at all.
NewHelp**And it takes bug reports by talking.** Tell it something is broken and it asks the two or three things an engineer would actually need — which window, what it said, when it started — checks what it can check itself, then files the ticket on the studio's support desk and answers with its number. The ticket arrives at the same desk as every other, carrying the chat it came from.
NewHelp**The bot speaks first when a chat goes quiet.** A day with nothing in a connected chat usually means people forgot there is anywhere to write — so it writes one short line saying it has been quiet, that it is here, and what it can do. Once per silence, never a daily reminder: it says nothing more until somebody has spoken again, and an admin can switch it off per chat.
ImprovedHelp**The bot works out what you actually asked.** A question about the studio is answered from the book, a question about a production is looked up in the production, something broken becomes a ticket — and a wish is none of those. *Add Seedance 2.5* now gets an honest answer about how the catalogue works today and goes on the feedback portal as a post with a number, instead of a paragraph explaining why it was misunderstood. If the bot cannot tell which you meant, it asks.
ImprovedHelpIt answers in one message rather than a silence. The reply appears the moment you ask — *Читаю вопрос* — says what it is reading while it reads, and then becomes the answer in place. Ten seconds of nothing was what made people ask twice.
NewHelp**A support forum is understood as a forum.** If the chat is split into topics, the bot answers inside the topic it was asked in, keeps a separate conversation per topic, and reads the topic's name as a hint: a breakage under *Something is broken* goes to a ticket, a wish under *I wish it could* gets an honest answer and the feedback portal instead. Topics appear in Settings → Telegram by themselves as they are created, and an admin can correct what any of them is for.
NewSettingsA chat is trusted by its id and nothing else: send **/id** in the chat and an admin adds the number in Settings → Telegram. Everywhere else the bot answers from the documentation and goes no further — it cannot see a production and cannot file a ticket there.
NewShots**Seedance 2.5 shoots 1080p.** The resolution picker offered 480p and 720p because that was all the model could do when it arrived; it has since learned full HD, and the studio was still holding the old list. 1080p is on the picker now, and so is the bitrate choice — standard or high — that only 2.0 used to show. Watch what it costs: 1080p on 2.5 is about two and a half times its own 720p, and about one and a half times what 2.0 charges for the same size, so a ten-second take goes from roughly $4.70 to roughly $11.60. The figure under the picker says so before you shoot. There is still no 4k on 2.5 — that one remains 2.0's.
2026.09.21Sep 21, 2026PatchSep 21, 2026
A handful of references at once#
The Shot generator's Upload button now takes every picture you pick, the way dropping them on it always did — and you can say which Claude the crew answers you with.
FixedReelA new reel reads its screenplay again. Since Friday, a production created with a script attached opened on an empty studio and stayed there: the breakdown's estimate never came up, so the script was never read and every department waited on a reel that had no scenes. Creating a reel now goes to that estimate, as it always did. A reel already stranded is not lost — open it and the timeline says it has not been broken down yet, with **Start breakdown** beside it, which is also the way back if you close the estimate and change your mind.
NewReferencesDownload a reference from the window you are working in. Every reference photograph — on a scene's board, on a character, on a costume set, on a makeup state — and every picture picked into the Shot generator now has a download beside it. What you get is the original, full size, not the small copy the tile draws, and it arrives under the production's own name for it — `LUR_ANNA_REF02.jpg` — so a folder of them sorts itself. Looking is enough: somebody who may only view the production can take the file too.← from post #13
NewGalleryRead the gallery one scene at a time. **Scene** in the gallery's header narrows every department at once — the art drawn for it, the blocking plates, the boards, the frames, the clips and whatever the Generate studio made for it — and the albums, tags, search and export all work inside it, so handing somebody one scene's work is one pick and one download. A take knows its scene because the window that made it did: a reference uploaded in the Shot generator, a picture brought in while a scene was showing, a reference filed against a scene. What belongs to no one scene — a character's turnaround, a render made on the free shelf — is under **No scene**, which is an answer and not a hole. The same picker sits over the Shot generator's gallery and reference picker and the moodboard's Add from gallery. What was already tied to a scene before today — a clip bound to a shot on the timeline, an album named for a scene — is filed there already.
NewSettingsChoose the model the crew answers you with. In Profile → Keys & integrations, two choices: the one a conversation with a department opens on, and the one a room opens on — a room being where one question is an answer from everyone at the table, so the price scales with the seats. Each option names what it costs per million tokens, and leaving a choice on “as the studio does” follows whatever the studio ships. A chat that already carries its own model keeps it: this is what the rest start on.
NewDirectorSay how a scene is solved, and what everyone in it wants. Every scene card in the Director's window now carries **Direction**: the artistic device the scene is played with — a long take with no cuts, a subjective camera, a rapid on the turn, the whole scene on reflections — and, for each person in the scene, what they are after **here** and what stands in their way. That is the scene-sized want, not the through-line of the role, which stays with the character in Casting. The Director fills both in when it reads a scene; click any line to write your own, and a re-analysis leaves what you wrote alone and rewrites only its own. It reaches the work: the device and the wants of the people in frame are written into the prompt of every frame and every clip of that scene, they travel in the production's passport and its export, and changing one marks the frames already shot on it as out of date — the same mark a new face or a new costume leaves.
ImprovedReferencesEvery reference the studio already had is now in the References window. Whatever a department gathered on a scene's board before the window existed — the photographs the art director uploaded, and everything the old search saved by itself — is filed in that scene's collection, with a note of where it came from. The boards keep their pictures and keep drawing them; nothing was moved and nothing was thrown away. Your own photographs come through as the **base** of the scene, which is what ticking “use” already made them; the search’s own finds come through as candidates, so nothing new reaches a render until somebody picks it.
ImprovedReferencesA reference nobody has cleared no longer reaches a model. A picture with no licence the studio can rely on is marked **Look only**: it stays in the collection to study and to show, but the Generate studio and the Shot generator will not send it, and the pre-flight check says which picture it is before you spend a render waiting to find out. Open it in References, say where it came from or attach the permission, and it is usable everywhere at once.
ImprovedShotsUpload several references at once. Choose a handful in the Shot generator's file dialog — for the references rail, for the frame to animate, for the video stage's image, video and audio slots — and they go up one after another in the order you chose them, exactly as they have always done when dragged in from the desktop. Pick more than the slot has room for and it takes what fits and says so, instead of quietly keeping the first one; a file it cannot take, because it is too large, no longer cancels the rest of the pick.
ImprovedStudioPictures open full size in more of the studio, and open the same way everywhere. A prop's plate and each of the photographs it was built from, and — in Makeup — every angle of a state, the photographs of the condition, the state's sheet and each look it has been dressed in: click any of them and you get the original, not the small copy the tile was painting. What opens is the set it belongs to, so ← and → walk the rest of it without closing anything, and Esc closes the picture rather than the window behind it. A frame whose bytes are slow to arrive now says it is on its way instead of showing a black rectangle, and says so plainly if they never come.
2026.09.20Sep 20, 2026ReleaseSep 20, 2026
Nothing changes quietly#
A location is one place now, shot in as many looks as the story needs, and a costume says which scenes it is worn in — so a scene marked winter night stops building on the summer the place was drawn in. What was made before the change says so: an amber dot on every take whose source has moved, and a log of every row that changed anywhere in the production, with what it said before. Pictures can be dragged straight into the studio from your desktop or another tab, and the Producer’s dailies can arrive on your own ClickUp board.
NewProduction DesignA location is now one place across every scene that plays there — and it can be shot in more than one look. Add a season, a time of day, weather, or anything else the story does to the place; or ask the designer to read the scenes and name the looks the script demands. A look is re-shot from the location as designed, so the architecture, the framing and the materials hold and only the conditions change. Then each scene is shot in one of them — the designer can place them all at once off the sluglines and story days, and a scene you set yourself stays where you put it. Shots are staged against the look their scene is in, so a scene marked winter night no longer builds on the summer the location was drawn in.
NewCostumeEvery look now says which scenes it is worn in. Tick them under the set and shots in those scenes are dressed in that costume — it reaches the generator in words, and that look's plate leads the references instead of whichever set happened to be first. Nobody wears two costumes in one scene, so ticking a scene that belongs to another look moves it there. When the Costume Designer builds the wardrobe from the script it fills the scenes in itself.
NewStudioA take now says when it has gone out of date. Re-render a face, re-shoot a location's plate, change the camera package — and everything already made from it carries an amber dot: the full-length and the costume plates, the board, the frames that character is in and the videos cut from them. The dot says which of them moved and when, in the gallery and in the window the take lives in. It is a note, never a block — if the drift does not matter to the scene, accept it and the dot goes.
NewStudioHistory now has three logs instead of one. Work is what the crew did — every request, process and message. Changes is every row created, edited or deleted anywhere in the production, with what it said before: who renamed the character, who cleared the costume, what the shot's camera used to be. Access is who was let in, what was shared and what was removed. Changes is for anyone who can edit the production, Access for whoever owns it — and Changes is written by the database itself, so nothing gets in without a line.
NewStudioDrag a picture straight in. A photo from your desktop — or one dragged out of another browser tab, off any page you found it on — now lands wherever the studio takes pictures: the Generate studio's attachments, the Shot generator's references, the reference photos in casting, costume and makeup, props, the location boards, the poster and the gallery. The place you hold it over lights up and says what it will do with it. Another site will not hand a picture to the page, so the studio fetches it for you and saves it to the production like any other upload; a still of your own, dragged from one window to another, is attached as itself rather than copied again.
NewSettingsClickUp, on your own board: connect your ClickUp under Profile → Keys & integrations — paste a token, pick the workspace, search the board for a list — and the Producer’s dailies for the productions you own arrive there every morning as cards, one per production that did something the day before, carrying the same report the crew reads here with a link back to the production. Your key, your list: nobody else’s productions reach it, and yours reach no one else’s.
NewStudioThe studio keeps its own board for what is administrative: every post from the public feedback portal, on the connection an admin makes at Settings → ClickUp — and productions never report there.
NewStudioA board for the models themselves. Benchmarks holds the studio's verdict on every model it can run — tried, preferred, not for us — with the note that says why, and beside the verdict the numbers the studio's own work produced: how much of the production's output each model made, how long it takes to answer, how often it comes back empty. A verdict is written once and read everywhere the model is offered.
NewSettingsLimits per account, and who answers for them. An admin can cap what an account may spend in a day or a month, and name the person who manages it — the cap is checked before a generation starts, so it is refused with a reason rather than billed and regretted.
NewProduction DesignReferences have a room of their own. Search Wikimedia Commons or Pexels from inside the studio, and a picture you keep arrives with its papers: where it came from, whose it is, what may be done with it — green, amber or red. File it to a scene or to a collection of your own, say what it is for, approve it. What a scene's approved base references show is what its location is built from: they lead the plates ahead of the photographs ticked on the board, so the architecture, the point of view and the framing of the place you found survive into the render. Rejected finds do not come back in a later search.
ImprovedGenerateThe library opens on one page of itself and scrolls for the rest, instead of sending every take in the production to the browser before it draws anything. On the largest productions that is a page of about twenty kilobytes where it used to be two megabytes, and the counts and tags arrive with it. A take still on its way now shimmers only while it is near the screen — with hundreds of tiles waiting, the animation alone was keeping the tab busy.
2026.09.19Sep 19, 2026PatchSep 19, 2026
The studio, written down#
Two lists that did not exist, and a way to ask them a question. The documentation is the whole studio explained department by department, for the people directing rather than the people building it — and the ? in every corner now answers out of it. The services page names every screen that sits beside the reels — the benchmarks board, the usage and cost reports, the prompt and dictionary editors, the desks behind the feedback portal — none of which were linked from anywhere.
NewStudioDocumentation: the whole studio is written down at /docs — sixteen chapters covering every department, window and control, in the language of the studio rather than of the code. The front page asks what you need to know, and under it asks which job you are here to do: seven roles, each opening the same book in the order that job needs it, with the screens in pictures and the controls marked on them.
NewStudioAsk a question: the ? in the corner of every screen now answers. Ask it the way you would ask a colleague — the answer is read out of the documentation and nothing else, and arrives with the pages it came from, which open beside your work rather than instead of it. When the book does not cover something it says so, rather than inventing an answer.
NewStudioServices: one page at /services lists every screen beside the main flow — what each one is for, who may open it, and how much the studio has actually used it in the last month. Studio staff only.
2026.09.18Sep 18, 2026PatchSep 18, 2026
The camera in the passport#
The production passport now carries the Camera's plan for every scene, numbers its locations and props, and says who on the production directs each agent. And a Director's brief now opens the window of the department it was written for. And a session recorded from the ? can now carry your voice.
NewSupportRecord with microphone: the ? menu can record your voice with the screen, so you can say what you are trying to do while you do it. The team hears it in step with the replay of your session. A microphone you would rather not share is simply refused — the screen is recorded all the same.
NewExportCamera in the passport: every scene's breakdown sheet lists its shots — size, function, angle and height, movement, lens, duration, who is in frame and what the shot is for — exactly as the DoP window shows them, your edits included.
ImprovedExportThe passport's breakdown is now a fixed form: every category sits in the same place on every scene, an empty one is marked with a dash, and a scene that does not fit starts on a fresh page instead of dropping categories.
ImprovedExportLocations are numbered L01, L02… and props P001, P002…, and every scene sheet carries the number of its location and of the props it lists, so the pages can be read against each other.
NewExportWho directs the crew: each agent in the passport names the people who direct it — the seat you gave them in Share, else whoever actually ran it — and a production team page lists the owner and everyone working on the film, with the agents each of them works with.
NewDirectorA brief in the Director's Briefs stage now has a button that opens its department's own window on that scene — the Production Designer's, the DoP's, Casting, Props, Sound and the rest.
NewDirectorA scene's breakdown opens its departments: next to Props, Set dressing, Wardrobe, Makeup/Hair, Sound and Music is a button to that department's window on the scene, and a character listed as present opens in Casting — in the scene window and in the Director's Scenes stage alike.
ImprovedDirectorThe crew now reads and writes with Claude Sonnet 5: script analysis, breakdowns, shot lists, briefs and poster titles all run on the current model, and a full pipeline pass costs about a third less.
2026.09.17Sep 17, 2026PatchSep 17, 2026
Show us what broke#
Every page of the studio now has a question mark in the corner. It records what you do while a problem happens, and turns that recording into a bug report Claude drafts for you — you read it, fix what it got wrong, and send it straight to the team.
NewSupportRecord a session: press ? → Record a session, do the thing that goes wrong, press Stop. The recording follows you from page to page and never captures what you type into fields — only that you typed.
NewSupportReport a problem: the dialog attaches your latest recording and Claude writes the report from it — what happened, the steps, what you expected, the errors the page showed. Edit anything before sending; it goes privately to the studio team, who can replay exactly what you saw.
NewCostsThe crew's time is on the bill: every minute an agent worked — each render, analysis and chat reply, finished or failed — is counted per department and month and billed at $100 an hour, under Agents on the costs screen and as Crew work in a production's cost report and statement of charges.
2026.09.16Sep 16, 2026PatchSep 16, 2026
A passport for the production, and every scene shot in one go#
The Director can now break down every scene still waiting for its shots with one button instead of one scene at a time. The export can hand over the production passport — the whole film as a printed reference document, pictures and all — and, beside it, what the production cost and who spent it. The timeline can be set to one department at a time. And every crew card says how long that job took.
NewDirectorAnalyze remaining scenes: one button in the Director's Shots stage runs the shot breakdown for every scene that has none yet, scene after scene, and stops at the first one that fails. Scenes that already have a shot list are left as they are.
NewExportProject passport: the production's reference document, as a real PDF. The story and its structure; the cast, each with their portrait, turnaround, wardrobe and makeup states; every location with the plates, palette and materials the art department settled on; a breakdown sheet for every scene — cast, extras, props, wardrobe, makeup, effects and sound — carrying the frames that were shot for it; the props with their plates; and the crew. Compiled from the production's own work, set in the studio's own typography, and printable at any size.
ImprovedCrewEvery crew card and every message an agent writes shows how long the job has run — counting while it works, and settling on the final time once it is done or halted.
NewExportCost report and statement of charges: what the production spent, itemised — every render, upscale and analysis with its model, what it was priced by, and what it came to — totalled per provider and per member of the crew, with the hours each of them worked. Estimated from our own price tables, since the rendering is billed to the key the production runs on.
NewTimelineThe timeline can be set to one department: pick a role and only its tracks stay on screen, with the choice named in the toolbar and dropped in a click. A role you never want to see is hidden for good with the eye beside it — the timeline then says how many are hidden and brings any of them back by name.
ImprovedGalleryA department opens on its 200 most recent stacks and draws the rest as they are asked for, so a production with thousands of frames opens its gallery at once — in the editor, in the pickers, and on the moodboard alike. Paging through the lightbox no longer stops at the edge of what has been drawn.
2026.09.15Sep 15, 2026ReleaseSep 15, 2026
Every reel gets its poster, every clip its name#
A production nobody gave a poster no longer waits for one. While the Director reads the script, the studio draws the key art — and a poster now carries the film's title the way a release one-sheet does, not the working name the project list knows it by. The production files every generated clip on its shared drive under one name — production, scene, shot, take — and the crew was renaming each download by hand to fit it. Clips now leave the studio already called that, one at a time or a whole scene at once. And a render that runs long, or is turned away without a reason, no longer ends as a failed take the crew sends again. When a render does fail, the studio now says so wherever you are, whose problem it is, and what to do about it. And a production can now carry its own provider keys, so a client's film is billed to the client's account whoever on the crew renders it. On a phone, a reel now opens its crew chat and its sharing. And a big production no longer drags: typing, switching shots and opening windows keep pace on a reel of a thousand shots.
NewPosterThe script analysis draws the poster when the reel has none. It starts as soon as the screenplay is understood — logline, synopsis, genre, tone — runs alongside the rest of the breakdown, and never replaces a poster you uploaded or generated, even one that lands while it renders.
NewPosterPosters letter the film's title. The title is taken from the project name with the drafts, versions, dates and client tags struck out — "BURN NIGHT_v.04_Sep 8 (client)" goes onto the poster as BURN NIGHT — and from the screenplay's file name when the project is still called Untitled Reel. The Poster window shows which title was lettered, and the title wording is editable on the prompts page like every other prompt.
ImprovedProjectsA reel card no longer prints the project name across a poster that already has its title on it; the name is a hover away. Uploaded posters and cards without one keep the name as before.
ImprovedPosterOpen the Poster window while the analysis is drawing one, and it shows that render's progress and the result when it lands, instead of offering a second render on top.
NewShotsEvery clip downloads under the name the production's drive files it by: LUR_SC008_SH040-060_TK03.mp4 — the production, the scene, the shots the clip covers counted in tens, and which take it is. A clip of a single shot is simply SH020. The take strip shows the shots and the take under each clip, and the download beside the one on screen saves it under its full name.
NewShotsScene · all clips downloads every finished clip of the scene in one ZIP, each under its drive name — open the scene's folder on the drive and drop them in.
ImprovedShotsA take's number is settled the moment its clip arrives and never changes: a failed render takes no number, and a clip keeps its name after the timeline re-packs its sequences around an added or re-timed shot.
ImprovedGalleryExporting shot takes from the gallery names them the same way, and so does the download on a take's public link.
NewProjectsSet the file prefix in Edit reel. Left empty, it is the first letters of the title — LURIA 0408 is LUR.
FixedShotsA clip still rendering after 45 minutes is no longer marked failed. The take waits in the strip and lands when the render finishes — the Shot window picks it back up on its own, and the morning sweep collects the rest — so there is no reason to send the shot again.
ImprovedShotsWhen Seedance turns a clip away without saying what is wrong, the studio sends it once more by itself half a minute later, and says so under the progress bar, instead of reporting "Invalid inputs".
FixedShotsReference stills and clips stay readable for as long as the render queue takes — a long Seedance queue no longer ends in "Failed to download the file".
FixedShotsA storyboard or hero frame on Nano Banana 2 no longer fails its first try over thinking_level: the settings under the model picker send only what the model understands. A clip's length reaches the video model exactly as picked, so Luma Ray renders the 10 seconds you chose instead of its default 5.
ImprovedGenerateA refused render says what happened in plain words — the model's content filter, an empty answer from the model, or a reference file it couldn't read — instead of "Invalid inputs" for all of them, and keeps the model's whole explanation.
NewPhoneTalk to the crew from your phone. Tap a reel and the whole crew, each department one to one, and your rooms are there — the same conversations as in the studio, so a question asked on the way home is waiting in the editor in the morning. Pick the model, address one person in a room with @, open a new room; while an answer is coming the screen stays awake.
NewPhoneShare a reel from your phone. Invite someone by the email they signed up with, choosing view or edit access and their crew role in one go; tap a person to change either, or to take their access away.
ImprovedPhoneThe phone says what it is. The first time you open Stanislavsky on a phone, a screen explains what works there and what needs a computer; a line under the bar of every phone screen repeats it, and Send link puts the studio's link on your computer through the share sheet.
ImprovedEditorOpening a reel's editor on a phone no longer stops at “open on a computer” — the notice now leads straight to that reel's crew chat and sharing.
NewStudioA failed render no longer hides in the window that asked for it. Wherever a generation fails — a shot's frame or clip, the storyboard, Casting, Makeup, locations, props, the poster, Generate, an upscale, a retouch or the script analysis — a card comes up in the corner of whatever page you are on, and the failures button under the cards lists every one still open.
NewStudioEach failure card says whose problem it is — the model's provider, your account, the content filter, the shot's setup or the studio — what happened in plain words, what that reading rests on (how the model was doing for the whole studio at that moment, when the shot last rendered), and offers the move that fixes it: open the shot, switch Seedance 2.5 to 2.0, top up, update the key. Repeats fold into one card, and a render of the same thing that comes out closes it.
NewChatAsk the Producer about a failure. The card hands it to the Producer in Project chat with everything behind it — the prompt, the references as pictures, the provider's own words — and the Producer works out why it was turned away, rewrites the prompt, and can open the Shot generator with the new one.
NewShotsA render is checked before it goes out. A Seedance clip, a final frame or a Generate run first has its references read against the model — an @Image with no file behind it, more references than the model takes, a picture or clip outside the sizes and lengths it accepts, a damaged file, two faces where fal refuses them — and waits on a card: go back and fix it, or render anyway.
NewProjectsA production can pay for itself. Give it its own Anthropic, fal.ai, Magnific or Pexels key — in Edit reel, or in the editor's Generation settings — and everything made in it runs on that account: renders, the crew's answers, the script breakdown, reference searches, whoever presses the button. A provider left empty keeps running on each member's own key from their profile.
ImprovedStudioA production's key is checked with the provider before it is saved, shown only by its last four characters with who set it, and can be changed only by someone who may edit the production. Generation settings says whose key the next render runs on — the production's or yours.
NewModelsGPT Image 2.5 is on every image picker — Casting, Makeup, locations and props, the storyboard, the poster, both shot frames and Generate — as Sunburst for the finest detail and Flare for speed, with quality up to max, up to ten images a run, and references or a painted mask on its edit model. Productions on Magnific get GPT Image 2, with references.
NewSettingsAdmins choose which models each account may run. Settings → Model access lists every account and switches Generate models on or off for it — by media type or one by one — and decides whether models added later arrive on or hidden. Generate, Retouch and Upscale list only what the account may run, and say so when nothing is left.
ImprovedProjectsOpen the Generate studio straight from a reel card, or from Generator in the sidebar, which asks which production to open so every take lands in its gallery.
ImprovedEditorA big production's editor keeps up. An open editor no longer redraws itself every second while nothing is happening, the timeline is the first thing to arrive when you open a reel, and closing a department window you only looked at no longer reloads the reel behind it.
ImprovedGenerateTyping a prompt in Generate no longer waits on the library — on a production with thousands of takes each letter used to cost a fifth of a second. The library opens without holding up everyone else in the studio, and its cards load as light previews instead of full-size renders.
ImprovedShotsSwitching shots in the Shot generator no longer reloads the whole reference library; it loads when you open it, and shows new takes as they land.
ImprovedMakeupPicking a scene in Makeup or a character in Casting answers straight away instead of re-reading the whole cast each time.
ImprovedGalleryClips in the gallery, the take strip and the chat load when you scroll to them, and a still or clip you have already opened comes back from your browser instead of downloading again.
ImprovedProjectsReel posters load as light previews and stay put until the poster changes, so the reels list opens without fetching every poster in full.
NewStudioWhen Stanislavsky is updated while your tab is open, a note in the corner says so and offers Reload — instead of buttons that quietly stop working. It never reloads by itself, so nothing you are typing is lost.
FixedEditorThe History tab no longer keeps refreshing forever on a production with an old run that never recorded its end, and the render panel keeps following a render through a dropped connection instead of giving up at the first missed update.
ImprovedGenerateThe Generate library opens on its latest takes and draws more as you scroll, in two columns that stay put: a finished take lands at the top of a column, where its placeholder stood, and nothing already on screen moves. History works the same way, and starts from the top whenever you open it or change its filter.
FixedGalleryA department with more than 4,000 takes no longer quietly loses its oldest ones from the gallery window, the Shot generator's pickers and the moodboard.
2026.09.14Sep 14, 2026ReleaseSep 14, 2026
Makeup that carries through#
Three things the studio found on one character: a made-up face turning up on the character's own Casting card, a full length that came back clean under a stitched portrait, and a wound that went soft the moment the camera stepped back. They are fixed — and makeup can now be built the way it is on set, one state on top of the last.
FixedCastingCasting shows the character as written again. A freshly made-up portrait no longer takes over the portraits, the full length, the look preview, the character sheets or the PDF — those stay the neutral base, and the made-up takes stay in Makeup & Hair.
FixedMakeupThe full length now carries the makeup of the portrait. The render is told which picture is the body and which is the face in its condition, so the wound, the stitches and the dirt on the close-up are the ones on the whole figure — not a clean face with the condition guessed from words.
ImprovedMakeupFull-length views render at 2K. At the old size a whole figure left the face too few pixels for a split brow or a line of stitches; on Nano Banana Pro the bigger render costs the same. And when a take has been upscaled, the render starts from the upscale — the picture you approved — not the smaller original underneath.
NewMakeupOutdated views say so. Re-render a state's portrait and every view that was made from the old face is marked Outdated, with a line above the tiles saying what changed and what to re-render.
NewMakeupEach makeup state has its own model, picked on the state's card with its price. Switching the model in Casting no longer moves the makeup renders with it, and every tile shows the model and resolution it was made at.
NewMakeupBuild a state on another state. Pick what a state is painted onto — the base or any other state — and choose whether its description is the whole condition or only what changes: a fresh gash, then the same gash stitched, then a scar. The new portrait starts from the earlier one's face, and the shot's cast notes read the whole chain.
NewGalleryFile a take into an album from wherever you are looking at it. Hover any frame — in Casting, Makeup, the Shot window, the Storyboard, Generate — and an album button appears beside Upscale; click it for the project's albums, tick the ones it belongs in, or make a new album on the spot.
NewTimelineZoom the timeline in until a single shot fills it. The zoom used to stop at four times the whole reel — on a feature that left a three-second shot two pixels wide; it now goes down to a second of reel across 160 pixels. The ruler re-divides as you go, from ten-minute marks to single seconds, and the readout says how much of the reel is on screen instead of a percentage.
ImprovedTimelineGet to the stretch you mean in one move. Click the zoom readout to fit the scene, sequence or shot under the playhead, or show 10 seconds to half an hour across the timeline; ⌥-drag along the ruler to zoom to that stretch, ⌥-click a scene or shot to fit it, press = and − to step and ⇧Z to see the whole reel again. A playing reel keeps the playhead on screen, and widening the crew panel no longer throws the view to another part of the reel.
FixedTimelineA shot the Camera timed with its reasons written after the number keeps its real length. One such note — “18–24 seconds, enough for the refrain…” — laid its shot out as twenty-one minutes and pushed the rest of the reel aside. The timeline now reads the length at the start of the note, counts a timecode like 0:18 in full, and gives the export, the sound cues and the Seedance sequences that same length.
NewGenerateAsk an LLM without leaving Generate. The new LLM filter lists Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, Kimi and DeepSeek on your fal.ai account: attach a frame from the gallery and ask what is in it, or ask for three takes on a shot description. The answer lands above your takes with what it cost, stays with the production, and Use as prompt drops it — or just the sentence you selected — into the prompt box, ready to render.
NewGenerateMagnific's prompt tools sit in the same filter. Improve Prompt turns a line into a full image or video prompt in the language you pick, and Image to Prompt writes one from a frame.
FixedGenerateThe model filter fits its column again. What a run makes — image, video, audio, LLM — sits on one row and Retouch and Upscale on the row below, instead of the last tab running off the edge.
NewGenerateSee what any picture was made with. Every take in Generate shows its prompt under the caption — click it to read all of it, copy it, or put it back in the box to make another like it.
ImprovedGenerateA render you download and bring back in keeps its prompt. Drop it into the gallery, a Generate slot or a shot's references and it arrives with the prompt that made it — the studio's existing uploads that were its own renders have theirs back too. For a file from outside, write its prompt on the card.
FixedGenerateAn upscale or an erase no longer records whatever was left in the prompt box from the last model. It carries the prompt of the take it was made from.
ImprovedGenerateThe prompt box grows with what you write, up to eight lines, and its bottom edge pulls taller for a long video prompt. Double-click the edge to let it follow the text again; the height you set is remembered on this computer.
2026.09.09Sep 09, 2026ReleaseSep 09, 2026
The room stops going quiet on you#
Two things the studio wrote in about, and they turned out to be the same complaint from opposite ends: the editor freezing mid-sentence while a generation ran, and a render you had no way to read. The editor was asking for its crew's progress once per open window, several times a second, on the same channel your own edits travel on — so a keystroke queued behind a status check. It now asks once for the whole production and is told 'nothing new' in a few hundred bytes. And the Shot window finally says where your render is in the queue and how long this model actually takes, while the render itself stops belonging to the tab that asked for it.
FixedEditorTyping no longer stalls while the crew is working. Progress from every agent now arrives on one channel of its own, separate from the one your edits travel on, so nothing you type is ever queued behind a status check — however many generation windows you have open.
ImprovedEditorA quiet production is a quiet editor. When nothing is running the studio checks in less and less often instead of every three seconds, and picks the pace straight back up the moment a shot starts rendering.
ImprovedEditorA crew card ticking over used to redraw the whole editing room — timeline, canvas and every open window — to move one progress bar. Now it redraws the crew panel and nothing else.
FixedGalleryA finished clip plays on the first click. Opening one full size used to leave a black rectangle that never started — the browser was refusing to play it out loud on its own, and there was nothing on screen to say so. Every player now shows the take's own frame while it loads, starts with sound where the browser allows it, and drops to silent rather than to nothing where it doesn't.
FixedGalleryA take that will not load now says so, with a button to try again and a link to download the file, instead of spinning forever. The failure is also recorded, so a clip nobody can open is something the studio finds rather than something you have to report.
FixedGalleryDeleted frames leave the album you are standing in. The crew works with the Generate studio open in one tab and the gallery in another, and a take thrown away over there used to sit in the folder until somebody reloaded the page. Coming back to either tab now clears out whatever was deleted in the other one.
NewGalleryYou can cull an album from the album. Every take the studio rendered and every file the crew brought in now has a bin on its tile, and a whole selection goes at once — “Delete 12” beside “Export 12” — with one Undo that brings the batch back filed and labelled as it was. A frame that goes takes its albums, its tags and its public link with it. Portraits, scene art and shot stages stay put: those belong to the screens that made them.
ImprovedShotsThe render tells you what it is waiting for. While a clip renders you see your position in the provider's queue and what this model usually takes — measured, not guessed: the median and the tail of its real runs. Once a render passes its usual time the countdown stops and says so, instead of sitting at “finishing…” for another twenty minutes.
FixedShotsClosing the window no longer throws the render away. A take is recorded the moment the provider accepts it, so the work carries on without you: reopen the shot and it picks the render back up, finished or still going. Anything nobody comes back for is collected overnight. Cancel still cancels — it is now the only thing that does.
ImprovedShotsThe model picker shows time next to price. Every model and every Seedance tier carries what it actually costs in minutes as well as in dollars, so the fast variants — roughly twice as quick — stop hiding behind an unlabelled toggle.
ImprovedProducerThe morning report counts the slow ones. Renders that took over twenty minutes are their own line: nothing failed, so they appeared nowhere before, and a bad afternoon at the provider used to reach us as a message from the floor rather than as a number.
FixedGalleryA file stays in the album you put it in. Uploading into one used to show the frame there and file it a moment afterwards, in a second write nobody was watching: the album could look right until the page was reloaded, and a batch still going up would hop between albums whenever anything else in the window finished and asked for a fresh reading. The album now travels with the file and is written with it, in one step — a tile appears once, where you dropped it, and is still there at the end of the batch and after a reload. The progress line names the album the batch is landing in, and it is the one you started in even if you walk off to another while it uploads.
FixedUploadsA file too large to send is refused with a sentence naming it and the limit, wherever it is picked — costume references, shot references, a screenplay and its breakdown sheets. Oversized picks used to be dropped in transit and came back as an unexplained error.
ImprovedCrew chatWhen the crew will not answer, it now says why, and we can see it. A message that came back with an error used to leave no trace at all — you could report it and there was nothing on our side to find, because a refusal (your key missing, too many messages in five minutes, a thread that had gone) arrives as a perfectly ordinary reply with a refusal inside it. Every one of those is now written down, along with the failures the browser is the only witness to. Telling us the time you sent the message is now enough to find it.
FixedGenerateThe studio library opens at once, however much is in it. Every tile was asking for the take itself — a full render, 3.4 MB on average — to fill a thumbnail a few hundred pixels wide, and all of them at the same moment: a production with 3,752 takes in it asked the browser for about 12.7 GB before it would show you anything. The grid now paints a preview kept beside each take — about a ninetieth of the size, and still sharper than the card it fills — and only for the tiles you have actually scrolled to. Opening a take full size still gives you the take.
FixedPlatformOpening one production no longer slows down everyone else. That contact sheet was heavy enough to use up every connection the database has, and once they were gone every other screen in the studio waited in the same line — editors freezing, windows loading for minutes, work that was fine arriving as though it had failed. The library costs a fraction of what it did, and the platform now keeps a hard reserve of connections that no single screen can spend.
2026.09.06Sep 06, 2026ReleaseSep 06, 2026
A crew member in your own hand — and a door for what broke#
Two doors open. The studio now keeps a record of the craft decisions you actually make and can distil them into a Disciple of your own — built module by module, and read against a scene before you hire it. And a feedback portal, open without an account, where anyone can post what broke or what is missing, vote on someone else's, and follow it under a link that never changes.
NewDisciplesMake a crew member of your own. The marketplace's Create Disciple builds one module by module — the optics it favours, how it lights a room, how it tells a scene, how it cuts — on an archetype you choose, and compiles that into the instructions the crew member actually works by rather than a description of them. Before you mint it, a mirror test reads one scene twice: as the studio frames it, and as your Disciple would.
NewDisciplesThe studio watches how you work. A camera parameter you overrode, a prompt you tuned, a proposal you took or waved away, the take you chose, the crew member you swapped — each is kept as a craft decision against the department it belongs to, and the crew drawer counts how many are left before those decisions can be distilled into a Disciple without you writing a line of it. The ledger rides the undo journal, so one act is recorded once.
ImprovedMarketplaceMy Disciples sits beside the hired crew: the ones you have minted, what each was built from, and how far its calibration has come. Minting starts either there or from the crew drawer of the production that taught it.
NewFeedbackPost a problem or an idea at /feedback without signing in. Say what kind of thing it is, which part of the studio it belongs to, attach a screenshot if one helps, and the post gets a permanent link and a status you can follow: received, gathering votes, planned, in progress, shipped. While you type the title, posts that already say the same thing appear beside the form — a vote there counts for more than a second copy, because votes add up and copies split them.
NewFeedbackA roadmap built from votes. Planned, in progress and shipped in three columns — the planned cards grouped by the quarter they are aimed at, the shipped ones from the last two months, each naming the release it landed in. The roadmap is an intention, not a promise: a card can move. But every card on it came from a post and the people behind it, not from a slide.
NewChangelogA release note points back at the post that asked for it — "from post #112 · suggested by 47 people". A director who voted can see the day it landed, and the note carries who wanted it, not only what changed.
NewFeedbackLeave an email on a post and the studio writes to you when its status changes: when the work starts, when it ships — with the release — and when it is not going to happen, with a paragraph on why. One plain-text email per change, and an unsubscribe link in each of them.
NewPlatformA "What's new" marker at the top of Projects. It carries a dot while there is a release you have not read, opens the changelog, and the dot goes out once you have looked. Nothing to dismiss and no number to clear.
ImprovedFeedbackQuestions and demo requests take the same door. "Ask a question" and "Request a demo" sit beside problems and ideas on one form — a question is answered under its own link, a demo gets a weekday and a slot — so there is one place to write to the studio, whatever the reason.
NewFeedbackNothing waits for someone to check the portal. Every request also lands on the crew's own board the moment it is sent — tagged by what it is and which part of the studio it belongs to, and on one person's desk — so a question asked at midnight is in front of the team, not in a queue nobody opens.
2026.09.01Sep 01, 2026ReleaseSep 01, 2026
A shot is as long as the video in it#
Drop a clip on a shot and the reel takes its length from the footage. And the reel's clock stops losing seconds to the gaps between cards, so a bound video plays to its last frame instead of stopping short of it.
FixedTimelineEvery bound video was being cut off. The reel reads width as time, and the breathing room between cards was subtracted from that width — so a scene lost close to five seconds however short it was, and its shots played for a fraction of their footage. On the tightest scenes that was more than half the clip. The gap is now drawn rather than deducted: it costs the picture two pixels and the reel nothing.
NewTimelineA video you drop on a shot sets that shot's length. While a shot is only planned the Camera's estimate is the best number there is; the moment there is real footage, the cut runs exactly as long as what is in it, and the reel re-times itself around it. Take the clip off and the planned duration comes back — the estimate was never overwritten.
ImprovedTimelineThe playhead sits where it says it does. It was drawn against the reel's clock while the cards were nudged aside by their gaps, so the line and the shot it was over drifted apart across a long reel.
FixedCrew chatA long conversation no longer freezes the tab while the crew is answering. Every word that arrived redrew the entire conversation above it, so the longer a meeting ran the more work each word cost — a room several answers deep could take the window with it. The answer is now redrawn once per frame, and only the part that is actually changing.
ImprovedCrew chatYou can scroll up and read what was said earlier while an answer is still coming in. The thread follows the newest line only while you are at the bottom of it, and picks the thread back up when you return there.
2026.08.31.5Aug 31, 2026ReleaseAug 31, 2026
Put the crew round one table — and let the answer open the window#
A department thread becomes a room: two to eight crew members at the same question, answering in turn and passing the floor to each other. And an answer stops being advice about which window to open — it ends with the window, already filled in.
NewProject chatRooms. Seat two to eight of the crew at one table — the order you pick them is the order they speak — and ask once. Name a chair and they open, and the round follows where they send it. @dop @gaffer narrows the same question to two, and the transcript remembers why those two answered and nobody else.
NewProject chatA speaker can pass the floor. "Ask the Gaffer whether that holds at T/2.8" is not a note to you — the Gaffer answers next, out of his own department. A hand-off chain stops at six turns, and nobody speaks more than twice, so a room cannot talk itself in a circle.
NewProject chatA round says what it will cost before it runs, keeps a running total for the thread, and stops at a ceiling rather than putting a table of eight on the bill. Rooms start on Sonnet 5 — three seats for 8¢ instead of 21¢ — because a round is where depth per turn matters least: each crew member answers their own half out of their own dossier. Still a per-thread setting.
NewProject chatDo it. Half of what gets asked is not a question — "regenerate 7.3 wider", "put him in the grey coat" — and the honest answer was always a paragraph pointing at a window. Now it ends with the window: a card that opens the Shot generator on 7.3, the Gaffer on scene 2, Costume on Dylan, with the fields already filled in. Thirteen screens across the departments; the click is still yours, and the chat itself writes nothing.
NewProject chatA finished render speaks for itself. The progress card in the Crew panel is a lamp — it lights, it goes out, it cannot tell you how it went. So when a department's run ends, that crew member writes a line into your thread with them: "Lighting plates · sc.02 — done." If the second step fails, the same line changes to say so rather than a second one appearing under it.
ImprovedCrewOpening an agent gives you the person, not a mock. The creativity slider, three presets and paragraph of notes came over with the design comp and fed nothing. In their place: who is in that chair on this production, what they own, how much of it they have made, and a way through to their thread.
ImprovedTimelineThe reel can be moved by hand. Zoomed in, the only way along it was a 10px scrollbar buried under the whole department stack — and a mouse without a sideways wheel could not move it at all. ⇧ + wheel pans, ⌘ + wheel (or a trackpad pinch) zooms and holds the moment under the cursor still, and a middle-button drag grabs the timeline and throws it.
FixedProject chatAsking everyone reached one. The trigger for a whole-room round was written against a word boundary, and JavaScript defines that in ASCII — after a Cyrillic word there is none, so no Russian sentence ever matched. "Дайте все статус" went to a single agent that read thirteen departments in a row: $3.38 for one turn that should have been a round.
ImprovedChangelogThis page. It was a design comp — releases that never shipped, a roadmap carrying vote counts nobody had cast. Every release now ships with the code that made it and is named for the day it did, each has its own link, New / Improved / Fixed filter the list, and the feed at /changelog/rss.xml is real. The roadmap is what is genuinely being built next, with no dates and no votes.
ImprovedSettingsPrompts and Dictionaries open to read. Below studio tier both screens used to bounce you to Projects with nothing said, which read as broken — you can now see the text the crew is actually running and the terms behind the camera dropdowns, with a line saying which tier edits them.
2026.08.31.4Aug 31, 2026ReleaseAug 31, 2026
View-only means view-only#
A reel shared for viewing now behaves like one. Fields you cannot save no longer take your typing, buttons that would be refused say so instead of pretending, and the Share dialog offers your production's own crew as job titles instead of a list of roles this studio does not have.
FixedSharingOpen a reel you were given view access to and the studio stops acting as though it were yours. Prop cards, makeup states, lighting fields, camera overrides, moodboard cards, album filing, tags and captions used to change on screen and quietly fail to save — the change now does not happen at all, and a line tells you to ask the owner for edit access.
FixedSharingNothing that spends the production's budget starts from a view-only seat: renders, character and prop generation, storyboard passes, per-scene analysis, key art, backups and the crew and department chats are all held back rather than started and refused halfway.
ImprovedSharingThe crew label you give a collaborator is picked from the production's own crew — Director, 1st AD, Production Designer, Storyboard Artist, DOP, Gaffer, Casting, Costume, Makeup, Props, Sound, Editor — with the agent cast in each role named beside it, and the roles this reel actually cast listed first. It used to offer Showrunner, Cinematographer and Colorist, which are nobody on this timeline.
FixedCastingOpening the Character window on a reel you can only view no longer adds the Costume Designer to everybody else's timeline.
2026.08.31.3Aug 31, 2026ReleaseAug 31, 2026
The shot list takes an edit — and keeps it#
Scenes get the shots you want in them: add one where it is missing, duplicate a setup for coverage, or have the Camera dept write one from a line. Cutting four shots down to one now sticks — a re-analysis re-plans around your edits instead of over them.
NewShot listAdd a shot. Empty, to fill in yourself; a duplicate of the one above it, which is the coverage move — same staging, same lens, change the size; or written by the Camera dept from one line of intent, in the vocabulary the scene already uses. It lands directly after the shot you added it to, and on the timeline a moment later.
NewShot listShots are lettered where a set letters them: insert after 3.2 and you get 3.2a, then 3.2b. Nothing is renumbered, so every take, camera override and bound clip below the insertion stays with the shot it belongs to.
FixedShot listRe-analysing a scene no longer undoes the shot list by hand. The shots you added come back where you put them, and the ones you deleted stay deleted — before this, the Camera re-planned all four shots you had cut down to one.
ImprovedShot list⌘Z now reaches the shot list, so a mis-clicked delete is a keystroke rather than a re-run — and two people editing the same scene no longer overwrite each other.
ImprovedTimelineRight-click a cell on the Shots track for the same four: add after, duplicate, write one, delete.
2026.08.31.2Aug 31, 2026ReleaseAug 31, 2026
Every frame can be delivered at 4K#
There is now an Upscale button on every image and every clip in the studio. Pick a delivery size, watch it come back, and either replace the original everywhere or leave it where it is — both versions stay in the gallery either way.
NewUpscaleHover any take — a portrait, a set plate, a storyboard panel, a shot, a clip, anything in the gallery — and an Upscale button is there. It asks for a delivery size (2K / 4K / 8K for a still, 1080p / 1440p / 4K for a clip), not a multiplier, and tells you exactly what will come back before you spend anything: 1024×576 → 4096×2304.
NewUpscaleTen upscalers to choose from, faithful by default: Topaz Precision and Creative, Clarity, Recraft Crisp and AuraSR for stills, SeedVR2, Topaz Video and FlashVSR for clips, plus Magnific's two on a Magnific key. None of them asks for a prompt — the frame was decided when it was rendered.
NewUpscaleReplace the original and the whole production follows: the timeline plays the bigger clip, the export ships the bigger file, an already-published link starts serving it. Undo puts the original back. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is re-filed — both versions live in the project gallery, in the same stack.
ImprovedProject galleryEvery tile now says how big it actually is — 4K, 2K, 576p — and wears an ↑ when what you are looking at is an upscale standing in for the original.
FixedGenerate studioMagnific's two upscalers were unreachable: the studio insisted on a prompt for every Magnific run, and one of them has no prompt field at all. Upscalers no longer ask for one.
2026.08.31Aug 31, 2026ReleaseAug 31, 2026
The crew answers — and the last step can be taken back#
The right-hand panel stops being a placeholder: you talk to the crew about the production that is open, or to one department on its own, and the answer comes back with the shot list in hand. ⌘Z reverses what you just did. A take can sit in as many albums as it belongs in.
NewCrew chatThe editor's right-hand panel is a real conversation about the open production. The brief rides on every turn — story, structure, the scene table, the shot list, what each department has and has not made — and nine read-only tools fetch the depth it only names. It answers; it cannot generate, run a stage or edit an artifact.
NewCrew chatWrite to the crew and the crew routes it: ask about lenses and the DOP answers out of his own shot list, ask everyone for a status and everyone answers in turn. An @mention decides it outright.
NewCrew chatA separate thread with each department — Otto answers as Otto, with his persona, his charter and his department's own material, and every take he owns on the rail beside him. Pin one to the question and "why is this one flat?" has a subject.
NewCrew chatThe crew can see. Pinned takes go up as pictures and an agent can pull a frame into its own answer — asked to look at a storyboard panel, the Storyboard Artist found it drawn as a wide master where the shot list calls for a close-up.
NewCrew chatAn agent can fill in its own form. The card under the answer reads field: was → becomes, with Apply — the same write and the same validation a hand edit runs, recorded as your change, not the agent's.
NewCrew chatEvery parameter window has the dialogue beside its Screenplay panel — Casting, Costume, Makeup, Props and Gaffer included — opened on the department that owns the form. And a question asked in front of a window is about that window: a chip over the composer says what the answer will be about, with an × for when it isn't.
NewEditorUndo. ⌘Z reverses the last step, replayed from a journal that records every row a step moved — cascaded rows included. One step deep, per person, per production; undoing writes its own entry, so undoing that is redo. If someone else has touched the same rows since, it names them and refuses rather than quietly discarding their work.
NewGalleryAlbums replace folders. A frame filed under Client selects no longer leaves Night refs — it is in both. Filing is a checklist rather than a picker, dragging a stack onto an album adds it, and the export lays each take down once however many albums it is in.
NewGenerateKling video-to-video — six editors that take a clip rather than a frame. The attachments are named inside the prompt, so "replace the animal with @Image1" is the whole edit. Edit keeps the source's cut; Reference re-times and re-frames.
NewGenerateMask tracking. A region painted on one frame is followed through the clip instead of being held still for its length — which was only ever right when neither the subject nor the camera moved. The frame it will send is shown next to the toggle.
NewGenerateTwo more models take a painted mask: GPT Image 2's own edit endpoint, which makes the studio's default generator an inpainter, and Ideogram V3 Edit — the one that repaints type convincingly, for signage and slates.
NewGenerationEvery picture the studio draws has a model you picked. Casting had the only dropdown; now the art department's plates and props, the storyboard sheets, the poster and both of a shot's frames each have one — Nano Banana 2 and Pro, Seedream 4.5, 5.0 Pro and 5.0 Lite, GPT Image 2, FLUX.2 [pro], each with the reference-driven edit sibling the studio actually renders on.
NewGenerationThe choice sits where it belongs. A character keeps its model and a shot keeps its own, because those renders anchor each other and swapping mid-chain drifts the likeness; the art department, the storyboard and the poster take the production's — one hand draws the whole film, and a batch run with no window open uses the model the window shows.
NewExportTake the whole production home. The Export assistant has a second archive beside the delivery one: not what the crew made, but what the production is — every record in every department, the screenplay and breakdown you uploaded, every reference photo you supplied, the chat, the activity log, laid out so the production can be rebuilt from the file. Nobody's account details travel with it, and an invite code arrives spent.
NewExportBackups are kept, not just handed over. Ask for one and the studio builds it and holds on to it, with a real percentage rather than a spinner — the size is known before the first byte. Close the window, close the tab: it carries on without you, and the archive is waiting in the list when you come back, with everything you have ever taken.
NewExportA 13 GB archive downloads like any other file. The link goes straight to storage rather than through the studio, so there is no time limit on it and a dropped connection picks up where it left off instead of starting over.
NewExportRecords only, for when you want the thinking and not the pictures: the same complete database — screenplay, breakdowns, prompts, the crew's conversations — without the gigabytes of frames. Megabytes, ready in half a minute, and it still names every file the production holds.
ImprovedEditorThe crew panel takes the width you drag it to. Its left edge is a handle, the reel keeps a floor of its own, double-click snaps back, and the width is remembered per device — a laptop and a 32" display want different splits of the same reel.
ImprovedHistoryThe whole log is reachable. It was capped at 1000 rows with nothing said about the rest — on one production that hid 71% of its history. Now paged 200 at a time with the depth on screen, and Generate-studio runs carry an author instead of belonging to no agent and no filter.
ImprovedCrew chatA chat turn costs a tenth of what it did — 32.7¢ to 2.6¢, measured on a live thread — by ordering the context so the project brief is cached once for the whole crew, and keeping the part that moves between turns outside it.
ImprovedCrew chatOpening a thread no longer waits on the brief and the department dossier: 6.2s down to 1.9s. A department's material that will not fit is abridged in named steps rather than silently dropped.
FixedGenerateThe studio keeps the files you attach. A reference picked here used to be read into the page, sent inside the run and lost on reload — the one place in the studio where your own image wasn't saved. It now goes to the production's gallery as it is picked, like an upload in any other department, and comes back off the shelf with Attach on its card.
ImprovedGenerateAttachments travel as links rather than as payload. Encoded into the request, a few references were enough to push it past the provider's size limit and answer a run with nothing; the file is now sent as a signed link to the copy we hold. Footage goes up in slices, so the ceiling is the file rather than the request, and Retouch no longer refuses a large take.
FixedProducerThe daily status report had never run. The route answers 404 without its secret, and the secret was never wired into either deploy — so the scheduler had been firing into a 404 since the day it was created.
FixedCrew chatAnswers stopped disappearing. A finished turn was assembled from state that had already been reset, so it arrived empty and under the next speaker's name; and a slow re-read wiped the round before replacing it. Numbered lists keep their numbers, headings stop landing mid-line, and tables render as tables.
FixedEditorThe mock storyboard strip is gone — seven hard-coded rectangles labelled "CU — Mara" that came over with the design comp and were never wired to a project. The preview takes the space. The real storyboard is on the timeline lane and in the Storyboard Artist's window.
FixedEditorAn empty timeline is read from the reel that loaded rather than assumed.
2026.08.28Aug 28, 2026ReleaseAug 28, 2026
A 1AD joins the crew, and a week spent on the things that broke#
The first vertical slice of hired crew — a 1st AD with a catalogue of disciples behind it, castable from the marketplace and injected into the pipeline's personas. Around it, a week of the unglamorous half: runs that would not stop, a trail that lost deletions, and a database that answered 500 instead of trying again.
NewMarketplaceDisciples, stage one: a 1st AD role, the master catalogue behind it, the marketplace screen that casts one, and the persona it injects into the pipeline that runs.
NewProducerThe status report arrives in the morning without being asked — yesterday's work, digested, published to the crew room as dailies.
NewGalleryA tag on any take, and the crew's own shelf to file it on.
NewAnalyticsWho is using the studio, and how long they spend where — a screen for it, and the events under it.
NewCastingA character's state knows which scenes it holds for.
ImprovedShot generatorReferences travel as links rather than as bytes on the request, and the hero frame asks for 2K.
ImprovedGenerateThe Seedance prompt is written for the version it will actually run on.
ImprovedEditorWhat a shot already has, at a glance — before you open it.
ImprovedIntakeThe upload dropzone takes .txt screenplays, and the scene preview parses them the same way the breakdown will.
FixedGenerateA run that never answers can be stopped — and stops itself.
FixedPipelineA duplicate or failed run can start again under the same name, and a stale failure is cleared before it does.
FixedEditorThe Seedance prompt no longer leaks its own tokens into the text, the price badge stops colliding with the take, and telemetry flushes on a throttle.
FixedPlatformA read that lost its connection is tried again rather than answered as a 500; session writes are throttled and the pool's timeouts tuned.
FixedPipelineThe breakdown auto-starts once per production, not once per mount.
FixedPlatformA deletion — the one event the audit trail could not keep — is kept.
FixedPipelineA screenplay line without spaces still has a length.
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