Field notes
Things we had to find out the hard way while building a studio on top of Seedance, written down because the documentation doesn't cover them and a wrong guess costs real money. No tutorials on writing a prompt — there are plenty. These are the parts that surprised us.
Why the model refuses your reference photo
It refuses characters you generated yourself, because it reacts to photorealism rather than identity. Which treatments get a sheet through, why noise beats grids, and the recipe we use by default. Plus: a refusal is free, a pass can't be cancelled.
A voice that survives the cut
Why a character sounds like someone else in scene four, and the mechanism that fixes it. Includes the undocumented audio limits — the cap is on total length across all references, not per clip — and the MIME-type trap that rejects every valid MP3.
Draft on the cheap models, finish on the good one
You pay for the search, not the shot: eleven of twelve takes go in the bin. Find the idea on Mini at 480p, render the keeper on the full 2.0 — a third of the bill. Includes what a draft can and cannot tell you, and where upscaling honestly fits.