How it works, in detail

Getting started

1. Bring the work in. Upload one file or fifty — finished videos, or finished static creatives — or describe the track you want. The browser measures each file before anything is sent, which is what lets the cost be shown up front.
2. Pick the markets and the settings. Every market in one submission. For video the mode decides how much of the cut is rebuilt and therefore most of the price; for a creative it is the resolution and the placements; for a track it is the length and whether you want a cover.
3. Confirm the cost. Credits are reserved when you submit, not when the work finishes — that is what stops two large batches from both passing an affordability check and both spending the same balance. A batch you cannot afford is refused before a byte is uploaded.
4. Take the files. Named to match what you sent, in your own convention. A video job returns two files, with the subtitles burned in and without.

Video: modes and credits

A credit is a fixed unit. How many a second costs depends on the mode, and duration is rounded up to the whole second.

Re-rendering only the subtitles on a finished video reuses the localized audio and picture, so it is priced on our infrastructure alone — a couple of credits rather than a hundred.

Captions in the video’s own language are priced the same way, and are the cheapest thing here: no translation, no voice, no provider — so they cost what our own infrastructure costs rather than a rate per second of somebody else’s time. The upload screen quotes the exact figure for your files before you submit them.

Video: subtitles

Every job returns a version with subtitles burned in and one without. 8 built-in styles ship with the product, and a saved style of your own can set the font, size, colour, weight, slant, position, column width, outline, and a background plate with its own colour and corner radius.

Beyond the built-in faces you can upload your own — TrueType and OpenType, up to 30 MB, and you confirm you have the right to use it. How many your library holds depends on your plan; the table in the next section says which. We read the family name out of the file rather than trusting a label, and check which of your languages it can actually draw: a font with no Cyrillic is a font that renders Ukrainian as empty boxes, and that is worth knowing before the video is made rather than after.

Cues follow the speech: a pause ends a cue, a sentence ending breaks one, and nothing is on screen while nobody is talking.

Video: limits

Video: languages and regional variants

A regional variant is a market, not a spelling. Brazilian and European Portuguese are separate entries with separate voices, as are American and British English, and Mexican and European Spanish. Where a language is offered without a region as well, that is a real choice too — the right one when the accent does not matter to you. Each entry you tick is its own job and is priced like any other, which is why the number above counts entries rather than languages.

This is Video’s list, and Video’s alone. Statics and Music sell a shorter one — chosen by where the demand is rather than by what we could draw — picked out of this same registry. The server that accepts the job holds that list, so a picker cannot offer a market the door would refuse.

Statics

A finished static creative goes in with the language its copy is written in, and comes back repainted for each market you picked, in each placement you asked for. The wording is read off the pixels, translated, and drawn back into the layout; nothing is generated from a description, and your master is in every request.

What comes back is a reinterpretation of your artwork rather than your file with the words swapped — every pixel of it was drawn. The delivered pixels are transcribed back and compared character by character against the wording you sent, because a model given a brand name it thinks is misspelled will helpfully correct it. A creative that fails that comparison is redrawn — twice if it needs to be, at no charge, because you receive one image whatever it cost us to draw it. If the last redraw still differs you get it anyway, with the lines that did not survive named on the row: an apology you cannot act on is worth less than a creative you can fix. We never enlarge: what you receive is the smaller of what the model returned and what you asked for.

The image carries an invisible SynthID watermark that cannot be removed and that we cannot read. Wording is consistent between the shapes of one creative and is not carried between creatives; there is no translation memory.

Music

A description goes in — mood, voice, theme, tempo, key, and your own lyrics if you have them — and an MP3 comes back with a short title, the lyrics as plain text, and a square cover if you ticked the box. Nothing is uploaded: Music takes words and nothing else.

It is on every plan, the free tier included. So is every other product here — what a plan decides is how many credits a month you get, how long results are stored and how many seats you have, not which of these five you may open.

The track is checked before it is called finished: the audio is measured for length and level, the writing system of the lyrics is checked against the language you asked for, and a cover is checked for mangled lettering. A generation that comes back with nothing usable is refunded in full, including the cover we had already paid for.

A finished track can be turned into a visualiser video, which is its own job with its own price. Music is not attached to a video job in any way — no video job produces a track, no track knows about a video, and nothing in the system joins them.

When something fails

You pay only for what you receive. A failed job returns its credits automatically, once and in full, and says why in terms of your file. That holds even where we had already paid a provider for the work: the loss is ours, not yours. The refund appears in the credit history alongside the charge it reverses.

The commonest reasons are a file that is not what it claims to be, a video with no audio track, a master below the size Statics will repaint, and an upload that was cut off partway. All of them are caught before any provider is paid, which is why they cost nothing.

Retrying a failed job resumes from where it stopped rather than starting again, so a failure late in the pipeline is not charged twice.

The one thing that is not refunded is a generation you stop after it has started. The call to the provider was made on your instruction and it was paid for, and nothing done afterwards un-makes it. Everything else — our failure, theirs, a result that came back empty — comes back in full.

Storage and deletion

Finished work is kept for the period your plan includes and then deleted permanently — a localized video, a campaign of repainted creatives, a generated track and its cover, all on the same clock. The dashboard counts the days down on every job, so the deadline is visible from the moment the file is ready — a file that disappears unannounced reads as data loss whatever the policy says.

On plans that keep files for more than two days we email you two days before the deadline. On the shorter plans we do not, and deliberately: the warning would arrive minutes behind the message saying your video is ready, about the same file, so that message states the window itself. Either way the deadline lives on the job, counting down from the moment the file is ready — and a longer window is the thing you can buy.

The window belongs to the plan, not to the kind of file. Whatever a plan produces is kept for that long and then deleted — one rule for everything, rather than a window for video and a kinder one for whatever ships next.