ByteDance Unveils Seedance 2.5 for Advanced Long-Form Video Creation

The quality is quite high, but an observation is the direction they're taking these models correlates heavily to the usage demand of China vs the West. Specifically, they're immensely focused on t2v for action / high effect shots. There's one human reference shot in the entire release page, and that one doesn't focus on dialog at all.

For filmmakers I've talked to in the US, one of the biggest demands they have is v2v where they can carry over an actor's performance and insert it into whatever world they want. The movie market in China is somewhat different though - it's heavily oriented towards high action / high special effect movies. Consider this list of hollywood movies that have flopped in the US, but did great in China:

Warcraft (China: $225m box office, US: $47m)

Resident Evil (China: $159m, US: $27m)

xXx: Return of Xander Cage (China: $164m, US: $44m)

Pacific Rim: Uprising (China: $99m, US: $59m)

One read of this is that action movies / visual spectacles translate more universally than dialog-based movies. Another read is culturally China prefers that type of content in general. I suspect that for Bytedance, their focus is on action / special effects because thats where they see the demand.

Whenever I see the new releases around video generation (and image) generation models, I get goosebumps, because it just feels so fun to work with them. But then I remember that I spend upwards of $10k on inference generating well over 50k images for storyboards, training models; and probably creating almost an hour of video (I assume). Yeah, I get that things can be economic if you don't use the latest models (ran some case studies on this), but the latest models are the most fun to work with. It doesn't scale as well as "vibe coding" stuff together on the weekend. And when things work really well its almost as if you're seeing an zoopraxiscope come to life for the first time; and you just want to keep going.

I got a few offers to work with some startups in this space, but it also seems that many startups work on stuff that just doesn't seem to be very worthwhile (like creating masses of spam for YT or TikTok shorts), or even straight out morally/ethically wrong (cloning/deepfakes, etc). But seeing advances in this space; and coming from a filmmakers background, I might just end up being naturally drawn to this space on an engineering level and figuring something out along the way. As you can see I worked on a lot of stuff just for the fun of it, and documenting the process: https://edwin.genego.io/blog (but I stopped at the beginning of the year .... might.. just pick it up again.

Seedance 2.5 looks amazing, but MiniMax H3 is going to be open weights within 24 hours: https://fal.ai/minimax-h3. According to the ComfyUI team, it should even work acceptably on mid-range consumer GPUs like the 3080.

I'd honestly take the slight quality hit for more control and lower costs.

I don't think audio, image or video generation should exist. I haven't seen enough positive applications to justify the amount of harm these tools are being used to cause.

I would like to see seedance 2.5 at 1080 vs seedance 2.0 but at 4k to see which models outperform

From our experience putting in more money leads to more computerand better performance from the prompt

Where can you use seance to make movies? Do you have to sign up to a. Third party? Do they have an official app I don’t know about or is there an api.

I just can’t figure it out!!

There are no stupid questions only stupid people..

when it comes to figuring this out I’m one of those people

Fyi based on what people are saying on twitter, seedance 2.5 is ~2x as expensive. For a 30 second generation at dreamina it costs 1440 credits or around $15