Poster Projects

1. Poster Projects

A poster project turns a single poster into a short animated clip. It has no scenes, no narration track, no captions, and no final stitch: the animation the app produces is the final video, and the video model generates its soundtrack.

Everything else works as in a History project. Posters live in the same project list, render on the same GPUs or on Aificient Cloud, use the same credits, and use the same canvas and right-sidebar layout.

The Two Poster Pipelines

Poster mode has a segmented toggle in the composer with two pipelines.

Note: Once a plan exists in the conversation, the toggle locks for that chat. To switch pipelines, start a new poster chat.

Writing the Poster Prompt

For From zero the prompt is required. For I have a poster the image is required, and the text describes the motion.

Reference Images and Characters

Reference images and pinned characters share one budget of 5. Each character counts exactly as much as an image, and characters have their own extra limit of 3.

The composer shows one combined counter on the Reference assets pill and disables whichever side has run out of room.

Note: If a plan created before this shared limit existed holds more than 5 references, the app blocks Create project and tells you so. Send any correction in chat and the plan comes back trimmed and ready to create.

The Poster Plan

The reply in the chat is a poster plan card. It shows:

• Its title and a badge for the pipeline used.
• The imported poster, or thumbnails of the reference images and pinned characters.
• Three collapsible prompts: Poster prompt (only when designing from zero), First frame prompt, and Video prompt.
• Duration and aspect-ratio chips.
• The Create project action.

Keep typing in the chat to refine the plan ("snappier reveal", "different typography", "add light jazz music") and it is rewritten. You can attach new images with a correction; they are merged into the plan. If that pushes past the 5-reference budget, the oldest ones are dropped.

The plan that comes back is always the accurate record of what survived, so read the card rather than what you attached. The composer clears its attachments after every turn for exactly this reason.

Cost: Writing a poster plan is a metered charge. The prompt-writing model reads your reference images, so more of them makes the plan cost more and take longer to produce.

Creating a Poster Project

Create project opens the poster render-settings screen, with the plan preview attached beside it.

Creating the project also starts its generation immediately: the button reads Start generation, or Start images when Images only is on. If no runtime is available, you can still create the project with images only and render the animation later.

The Poster Canvas

The canvas shows the poster's own chain, left to right: project, assets, poster prompt, poster image, first frame prompt, first frame, video prompt, and final video.

• The references design the poster. The first frame is derived from the finished poster alone, not from the references or character faces. The animation then runs between the frame and the poster.
• An imported poster has no poster prompt step, so that column is closed up and the artwork sits one step after the assets box.
• The three prompt nodes are clickable and open the rewrite modal (see "Editing a Poster").
• The media nodes show the designed poster, the first frame, and the final animation, each with a progress state while it is being generated and a delete button.
• Poster previews are shown at their real proportions, so a 3:4 or 9:16 poster is not cropped to fit the node.

The Poster Sidebar

The right sidebar of a poster project has three tabs: Plan, Assets, and Settings.

Plan

Plan is the outline. Click any row to centre the canvas on that node.

• Project and Assets (with a count of references).
• The three prompts: Poster prompt (from zero only), First frame prompt, Video prompt.
• The three generated items: Poster image, First frame, Final video.

Each generated item shows its state: Not generated, Queued, Generating N%, Generated, or Failed. For an imported poster, Poster image reads Imported.

Assets

Assets lists the poster's reference images together with whatever the generation has produced, with download and focus actions.

Settings

Settings is a poster's whole video configuration, and it is deliberately small.

• Aspect ratio — read-only, set by the poster.
• Resolution — 720p (default) or 1080p.
• Mode — Lite or Pro.
• Video duration.

Changes are staged until you select Apply changes, or discard them with the circular-arrow button. While there are unsaved changes the footer warns Unsaved video settings and the render action is blocked, because a render always uses the saved settings.

Note: None of the History settings (captions, guidance scales, speech pace, voice delays, transitions) exist for a poster.

Sidebar Footer

The footer holds the same actions as a History project:

• Stop Generation while a run is active.
• An Aificient Cloud status chip while the clip is in the cloud queue.
• A Generating on <place> N% chip while another device is generating the poster. Starting a generation here then fails with This project is being generated on <place>.
• Otherwise, the Resume Generation menu.

Rendering and Resuming a Poster

Resume Generation on a poster offers two actions:

• A single runtime choice (one GPU, local or rented, or Aificient Cloud, with its estimated credit cost) and Add to render queue to render the animation. Missing poster images are regenerated first automatically, so this is the "finish the poster" action.
• Images only, which fills in the missing poster and first frame without rendering the animation. These are cloud tasks and need no GPU.

The action is disabled once everything has been generated.

GPU renders join the same per-GPU queue as History scene videos, so a busy GPU is still a valid choice. Cloud renders appear in Generation assets > Aificient Cloud alongside History jobs. Either way the finished clip lands as the project's final video; there is nothing to burn or stitch afterwards, so the project completes when the clip is delivered.

Note: If you close the app while a poster render is in progress, reopening the project reattaches to it and the sidebar and canvas pick the progress back up.

Editing a Poster

Click any of the three prompt nodes on the canvas to rewrite it. Type the replacement yourself, or describe the change and let the AI rewrite it. This is the same modal used for scene text in a History project.

Editing a prompt invalidates everything downstream of it. The modal spells out exactly what will be deleted for this project as it stands today.

If nothing has been generated from that prompt yet, the modal says so and the edit only updates the plan. After a rewrite that removed images, Regenerate images in the modal refills them straight away. The animation is rendered from the sidebar's Resume Generation menu, where the runtime choice lives.

Deleting Generated Media

The delete buttons on the media nodes cascade the same way. Each button's tooltip states what it takes with it.

• Deleting the poster also removes the first frame and the animation.
• Deleting the first frame also removes the animation.
• Deleting the animation leaves both images.

Warning: Deleting the animation asks first (Delete this video?, subtitled The animation, with Cancel and Delete video). Deleting the poster or the first frame does not ask.

Edit with AI works on a poster too. Ask it to rewrite a prompt, regenerate the poster or the first frame, change the tier, resolution, or length, estimate the animation's cost, or render it (see "Edit with AI").

What Posters Do Not Have

• Captions. There is no narration track to transcribe, so there is no caption step and no captioned-clip column.
• Stitching. A poster is one clip; the render is the final video.
• Publishing. The Publish dialog is available for History projects only.
• Scene tools. No scene list and no character node editing inside the project. A poster's characters come from your library at plan time.
• Transitions. There is only one clip, so there is nothing to join.

A Note on Poster Reference Images

Poster reference images stay in your assets folder; they are not copied into the project. The same image can therefore back several posters.

Warning: Deleting an image from your assets breaks every poster that references it. The app tells you the reference is no longer in your assets folder; attach it again in a chat correction to continue.