Length is free. Sharpness is not.

Most pricing you meet in video is a meter. Longer costs more, because longer is more work. That is true of a product shoot here, and it is the rule people arrive with.

Create does not work that way, and the rule is worth stating plainly before anything else: one film is one render, and one render is priced by the resolution you asked for. Length is not an input to the price. Neither is the number of reference photos, the aspect ratio, or how long your description was.

The three rungs

There are three, and they are the only pricing decision on the page.

• Draft, 360p — forty credits. Soft, quick, and perfectly good for finding out whether a description produces the thing you had in mind.
• Standard, 720p — eighty credits. The default, and the one most finished social clips are made at.
• HD, 1080p — two hundred and eighty credits. The sharpest, and three and a half times the price of Standard.

That last gap is the fact to carry around. Going from nothing to a Standard film costs eighty credits. Going from a Standard film to an HD one costs two hundred more. The expensive decision is not whether to make the film; it is which rung to make it on, and it is made in a dropdown that looks like a quality setting rather than a price.

What this means for length, which is the counter-intuitive part

The picker offers four, six, eight and ten seconds, and defaults to eight. Any whole second from three to ten is legal.

Every one of them costs the same.

So the instinct to shorten a clip to spend less does nothing, and it quietly costs you something. A four-second render and a ten-second render are the same price; the ten-second one is six more seconds of material you can cut down afterwards, from the same spend. If you are unsure how long the finished thing should be, the cheap answer and the long answer are the same answer.

The one reason to pick a shorter duration is that you actually want a shorter film — a tight loop, a single beat, something that has to sit inside a fixed slot. Pick the length for the edit. There is no budget in it.

How to spend the ladder

Because a draft is forty credits and an HD render is two hundred and eighty, the two-step approach is not a frugal compromise — it is cheaper than being right first time at the top rung, and it is much cheaper than being wrong there.

Write the description, render it at 360p, and look at it. You are not judging the sharpness; you are judging whether the model understood you — whether the thing moves the way you described, whether the framing is what you pictured, whether the mood landed. That costs forty credits and takes one attempt. Change the words, render again. Two drafts and a final HD film come to thirty-six credits. One HD film, found to be wrong, and a second HD film, come to fifty-six.

The corollary is worth saying too: if the clip is going somewhere small and fast-moving, Standard is very likely the end of the ladder rather than a step on it. Two hundred and eighty credits buys sharpness, and sharpness is only worth buying when something is going to be looked at closely.

The things that are free, and one that is not

The description can run to two thousand characters, and costs nothing at either length. Eight characters is the floor, which exists only to stop an empty box being submitted. There is no advantage to being brief and no charge for being specific, and specific is generally what works — the description is the entire brief.

You can attach up to four reference photos to a single film, to show the model a product, a person or a look rather than describe it. Those are free too, in the sense that they do not change what the render costs.

The one ceiling that is not about money in the obvious way is the session: twenty-four uploads across all the takes in one Create session. Every photo you add is screened on the way in, so that limit is a cost ceiling rather than a storage one. Past it you start a new session, which is not a penalty — it is just where that session's screening budget ran out.

Two defaults worth knowing before your first render

The aspect ratio starts at 9:16, vertical, and the only other option is 16:9. There is no square and no 4:5, so if your destination wants one of those you are cropping afterwards; check what your own surface expects before you render, not after.

And the sound is on. A prompt film keeps the soundtrack the model generates for it unless you turn that off, which is the opposite of the product shoot flow and surprises people. If the clip is going somewhere that plays muted, or somewhere you intend to lay your own audio over, turn it off before you render rather than discovering it in the file.

The short version

Describe it at length, render it short of HD, and let the clock run to ten seconds because the clock is not what you are paying for.