Standard frames are cheap and honest: generate generously, cull hard, and the sitting costs what the check-in nearly covers. The money in a series lives downstream — 21 for an edit, 26 for a face swap, 61 to upscale a still, more for video. Finishing spend is where judgement pays rent, and this room runs five checks before any of it is authorised.
The checks, in order
Identity
Read the frame against the card’s five lines. One failed line ends the review; the frame is culled, not finished.
Hands and edges
Hands, hairlines, jewellery and the seams of garments — the places generators improvise. One fault is an edit; three is a cull.
Purpose
Name the frame’s job: cover, feed, first frame for a clip. A frame with no job does not get finishing money, however lovely it is.
Checks four and five are commercial. Price: is this frame the one the pack will be judged by, or an also-ran asking for cover treatment? And order: repairs before swaps, swaps before animation, animation before upscaling — finishing out of order pays for the same work twice, because each later tool re-opens what the earlier one settled. Run the five in order and the expensive tools only ever touch frames that have already earned them.
Questions
What is the single most-skipped check?
Purpose. Beautiful frames with no job absorb finishing money in every studio that skips it.
Can a failed frame be rescued by an edit?
A frame that fails identity cannot. A frame that passes identity and fails one detail is exactly what the editor is for.
How many frames should reach finishing?
In a healthy sitting, about a third are kept and a handful are finished. If everything is being finished, the cull is not happening.