Check the cap before the colour

A render can look finished and still be wrong about your product. The lighting is right, the camera move lands, the set flatters it, and the cap on the bottle is not your cap. The buyer who opens the parcel checks the product, not the lighting, so the product is what you check first.

Nitaris builds every frame from the photo you upload and is built to hold the product true to it. Most renders pass the checks below in a minute. They are still worth the minute, because when a render does drift it tends to drift in the same few places, in roughly the same order.

Why some parts go wrong before others

A photo describes some parts of a product far better than others. A printed label is flat, it faces the camera, and the photo contains all of it, so there is a great deal for the render to hold on to. A closure is the opposite. A flip-top, a pump, a dropper, a clasp or a zip pull is small, three-dimensional, often clear or shiny, and seen from one side only.

The less the photo says about a part, the more the render has to supply, and what gets supplied is the most ordinary version of that part rather than yours. That is how a film can reproduce every word on a label and still put a tall screw cap where your product has a squat flip-top.

The checks, in order

• The hardware. Caps, lids, pumps, droppers, clasps, buckles, zips, hinges and spouts. Compare shape, height, colour and position against your photo. A different cap, or the right cap moved off-centre, is the fault a customer recognises first.
• The smallest type, at the smallest size it appears. Pause on the frame where the product is smallest, usually a wide shot or the moment it enters, and read your brand name letter by letter. Type that survives a close-up can corrupt when the product fills less of the frame, and a misspelt wordmark makes a render unusable however good the rest of it is.
• Anything added. Badges, seals, stickers, an extra fin or flange, a second button, a hallmark or engraving that is not on your product. Invented marks are easy to miss because they look plausible, so look for them on purpose.
• The finish. Matte should stay matte and brushed should stay brushed. A shoot moves the highlights, because that is what new light does, but a matte pouch rendered as wet, glossy plastic has changed the material. If your packaging makes a claim about its material, the render now contradicts it.
• Colour, in the film and the stills separately. Put a paused frame of the film beside a still from the same shoot, and both beside your photo, on one screen. Warm or cool light shifts a colour a little in any shoot. A saturated brand colour washing out to a pale one is drift.
• Scale, wherever there is a hand, a face or a countertop. A photo on a plain background says nothing about size, so a small bottle can come back the size of the hand holding it. An earlier post on this blog, "a photo does not carry scale", covers why.

Three faults, three different buttons

If the take missed on camera, light or mood, with the label turned away at the wrong moment or a set that fights the product, regenerate it. That is what varies between takes. An earlier post, "regenerate is a new take, not an edit", sorts those faults in detail, and every regenerate is charged.

If the product itself changed on a paid render, do not regenerate first. Report it. Paid renders in the web studio and the Shopify app carry a Report issue button. Say in a sentence what does not match: "the logo on the bottle reads ARIVA but ours says ARVIA" is exactly the right level of detail. An automatic check compares the render with your reference photo, and if the product drifted, that render's credits go back to your balance.

• It works per render. One wrong still in a set of six returns one still's credits, not six.
• You can report a paid render for 30 days after it was made. The free preview charged nothing, so there is nothing to return on it.
• It judges the product, not the shoot. A complaint about the angle, the lighting, the background, the crop or general taste is outside the check, and goes to the team as feedback rather than coming back as credits.

If the photo never showed the part clearly, the fix is upstream of both buttons. A cap in shadow, or seen edge-on, is a cap the render has to guess. Take one more photo with the closure lit and square to the camera before the next shoot.

Why a minute is enough

An earlier post argued that a product film is a promise the parcel has to keep. These checks are how you make sure the promise is about your product and not a close relative of it. They take a minute because you are not reviewing the film; you are comparing five or six specific parts against one photo you already have.

The short version

Check the hardware, the smallest type, anything added, the finish, the colour and the scale, in that order, against your own photo. Regenerate a take that missed. Report a render that changed your product. Reshoot a part your photo never showed.