How it differs from Short Drama Ads
Short Drama Ads renders in one pass: one product photo, one line of premise, out comes a 15-second clip. Good for volume.
Short Drama Studio is a production line you can rework: lock down the cast and sets first, then break the story into shots, then render shot by shot, then stitch them into one episode. It is slower and costs more, but you get the same person, the same outfit and the same room across a dozen shots. Use it for continuous storylines and for anything where the face has to be recognisable.
The four steps
Step 1 · Setup. Write a one-line premise or paste a passage, pick the episode length (15-300 seconds) and the resolution. At the same time, build the cards this episode needs — character, scene and product cards are kept separate.
For characters, four cards works well: front half-body, three-quarter, full-body and one more angle. Generate the first from text, then generate the other three using that first card as the reference. That is what makes them the same person. Two or three scene cards is usually enough — the same place at different angles or times of day.
Product cards can only be uploaded. They are never generated, never restyled, and there is no "regenerate" button — product fidelity is the highest-priority rule here. What goes in is what comes out.
Step 2 · Review the cards. Put the character cards side by side: same person? same outfit? This is the one point in the whole pipeline where a mistake ruins everything downstream, so it does not pass automatically — you have to press "These cards look right — freeze them". After that the whole episode uses this set.
You can unfreeze and redo, but unfreezing clears the generated shot list, because shots are bound to specific cards.
Step 3 · Shot list. Only available once the cards are frozen. The system splits the episode into shots (15 seconds each at most) and picks which cards each shot carries. You can edit both the action text and the card bindings for every shot.
Step 4 · Render. Shots render one by one, and each shot is its own billing unit. When they are all done they are stitched into one episode with subtitles.
How it is priced
Reference cards are charged per card, on generation — they are reusable assets, so the next episode can reuse them.
Video is charged per shot, not per episode. Before you press "Start rendering" the interface shows the total for this episode, and nothing is charged until you confirm. 1080p costs about 80% more than 720p; whether that is worth it depends on where you are publishing.
If you want to stop halfway, press "Cancel this episode": shots that have not started are refunded, shots already rendered are not — those clips exist and are yours.
Why it takes a while
The dozen shots in an episode do not start at once. To keep the upstream account out of rate-limit trouble, shots are submitted 20 to 60 seconds apart, and they share one queue with Runway Videos. So the wall-clock time is driven mostly by queueing, not by how long a single shot takes to generate.
The interface shows a range labelled as an estimate, and recalculates from the real pace once the first shot lands. It is not a precise number — do not plan against it to the minute.
Things that trip people up
If any shot has no cards attached, the batch is refused. That is deliberate: a shot with no reference image always fails upstream, and money is charged per shot the moment the batch is created. Better to be told which shot is the problem than to pay in full, wait fifteen minutes and get a pile of failures.
If a character card uses a photo of a real person, you must tick the portrait-rights box first. A first card generated purely from text involves no real person and needs no tick.
Individual shot clips do not show up in My Works. A dozen untitled clips per episode would bury the actual film, so only the stitched episode lands there. To review single shots, stay in the studio.
Refreshing or switching away does not lose your work. A running episode is picked back up automatically, and past episodes are listed under "My episodes" at the bottom of the panel.