Release 2026.08.31
The crew answers — and the last step can be taken back
17 new5 improved5 fixed
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.
← Older · 2026.08.28A 1AD joins the crew, and a week spent on the things that brokeNewer · 2026.08.31.2 →Every frame can be delivered at 4K
STANISLAVSKY · the directing room for AI film crews