Five-minute episode maker

What a five-minute target means

A series with a 5-minute runtime target asks the draft tool for a twelve-take outline with takes near the fifteen-second ceiling. Twelve fifteen-second takes come to three minutes of footage; thirteen cards add twenty-six seconds. The meter shows the planned runtime next to the target so you can see how far the plan reaches.

The target is a target, not a minimum. The packaging job runs with whatever finished takes the episode has. A five-minute series can package a three-minute episode; the meter simply shows the gap. The target exists to size the outline and to show progress while you render.

Longer takes are the lever. A twelve-take episode of eight-second takes runs about two minutes; the same twelve takes at fifteen seconds run closer to three and a half with cards. The draft tool knows the target and proposes durations accordingly.

Building twelve takes without losing the thread

The episode page lists takes in running order with their chapter titles, durations and status. Pending takes show a spinner, finished takes a poster frame, failed takes a note. You can render several takes in a row; each is submitted to the render service and finalised when it completes, so you are not waiting on one before starting the next.

Cast continuity across twelve takes comes from the library. Characters are generated once and reused as reference images in every take they appear in, with an outfit and a prop per character and one set per take. Name them exactly in the take description so the right references attach.

Reordering takes is a matter of moving rows. The chapter numbers renumber at packaging time, the chapter titles travel with their takes, and the meter reflects the order immediately.

Packaging the long cut

Packaging normalises every take and card to one codec, frame size and audio format before joining them, so a mix of 720p and 1080p takes comes out as one clean file at the larger frame. A five-minute widescreen episode is written at 1920 by 1080 when any take is 1080p; a vertical one at 1080 by 1920.

The job runs on a larger machine with a long timeout because twelve takes and thirteen cards take time to re-encode. It costs two credits, cards included, and the finished episode appears in your library with a poster frame, a preview clip and its own public page if you choose to publish it.

Budgeting a five-minute episode

At Standard 480p a fifteen-second take is 45 credits, so twelve of them are 540 credits plus two for packaging. At Standard 720p the same episode is 1,080 credits. A 5-minute series is where the Full Season plan or an Episode Pack earns its keep, and where a Sketch-tier pass to test the outline before committing to Standard takes saves real money.

Posters are three credits, drafts two. The price of every action is shown before you take it, and the backend refuses a job whose price does not match what you were shown.