Cheap disagreement
Previsualisation exists so that disagreement happens while it is still cheap. A draft frame costs little and arrives fast; a finished frame costs more and, on a real production, costs a day. The Previz grid renders one frame per hero shot so that you, the client, and your own second thoughts can all argue with the campaign before anything expensive is committed.
The economics are printed on the instrument itself: drafts are fast and cheap — finish only the frames you love. Every frame carries a quality badge, draft or final, and the finish action promotes a draft to a premium render. The discipline is to stay in drafts until a frame has survived scrutiny, and to finish sparingly. Finishing everything is just generating with extra steps.
One world across the frames
Consistency is the hard problem of generated imagery, and previz solves it with hero-first reference chaining. The hero frame is rendered first, and every subsequent frame is generated with the hero attached as a visual reference — same subject, same materials, same light logic. The hero anchors the world; the other frames inhabit it.
This is why the hero deserves your attention before anything else. If the hero is wrong, regenerate it before touching the rest, because every other frame is downstream of it. A strong hero makes the remaining frames cohere almost for free; a weak one makes them cohere around the wrong campaign.
You can also attach your own reference assets from the project’s media — product shots, location scouts, prior campaign frames. Attached references condition the next generation run, which is the correct way to hold a real product or a real room constant across the set.
The Space deck
In the Space discipline, previz stops imitating a photo shoot and becomes a concept deck. The set opens with a massing study, then an axonometric, then a section perspective, then the photographed moments — the threshold, the hero volume — and closes on a material board. Each schematic frame carries a mode chip naming its drawing type.
The schematic modes derive their geometry and materials from the hero photograph of the space, so the axonometric describes the same room the photographs show. This is the crit-deck logic of an architecture practice: the drawings earn belief in the idea, the photographs earn belief in the atmosphere, and the material board earns belief in the touch.
Generating and the media shelf
Previz lives in Chapter II, The Frames, alongside the media shelf at the chapter’s end. Generation runs from here; frames land in the grid as they complete, each with its caption and shot number, and the lightbox gives you any frame at full size. Regenerate individual frames rather than the whole set when only one is drifting.
The media shelf is the project’s archive — uploads, finished renders, reference material. It is also where the reference-attach control looks for assets, so a shot you upload to the shelf is a shot you can condition the next run on. Treat it as the project’s single place for anything with pixels.
Frames that finish themselves
Render jobs outlive your patience by design. If you navigate away while frames are still rendering, they are held as pending and reconciled in the background: the house periodically polls outstanding jobs and persists completed images, so an interrupted run completes itself rather than sitting unfinished forever.
The practical consequence is that you never need to babysit a generation. Start the run, go do director’s work, and come back to a fuller grid. A frame that stays pending unusually long can simply be regenerated — nothing about the set depends on any single render surviving.