I spent about three weeks trying to get text-to-video to produce consistent characters across scenes for a short project. Different prompts, different models, different seed tricks. Every generation gave me a slightly different face, different body proportions, different everything. I kept thinking I was just prompting wrong.
Turns out I was using the wrong tool entirely. Someone in a Discord server finally pointed out that text-to-video and image-to-video solve completely different problems. Text-to-video builds a clip from scratch based on your written description. Image-to-video takes a still image you already have and adds motion to it. These sound like minor variations but they're fundamentally different workflows.
Text-to-video is great for standalone conceptual clips where you don't care about character continuity. I used Runway for a few of these and the individual outputs looked solid. But the moment I needed the same person to appear in five clips, it fell apart. Each generation invented its own version of the character no matter how precise the prompt was.
Image-to-video was the breakthrough. I started generating my character as a still portrait first, got the face and look exactly right, then fed that locked image into video generation for each scene. I ended up on APOB AI for the image-to-video step since it could lock the same face across my source stills before animating them. The motion itself is still honestly not great though. Expressions drift frame to frame and I had to do three or four retakes per clip to land something usable. CapCut did the final editing and covered a lot of the rough spots.
The actual lesson: if you need character consistency, generate your stills first and control the face there. Then animate. You lose the "type a sentence and get a movie" simplicity but you gain something that actually cuts together into a sequence. Text-to-video for one-off clips, image-to-video for anything that needs to match across shots.
Would have saved me a lot of wasted credits to know this three weeks ago.
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