Budgeting an Automated Video Job: Credits, Resolutions and the REST API

If you are thinking about using Genjutsu AI from code, the first practical question is cost. Genjutsu AI is an AI video-to-video service that does motion transfer, and it has a REST API. This post covers what is known about how jobs are priced and what to plan for, without guessing at details the service does not publish.

What a job consists of

A job takes two kinds of input:

• A source clip that carries the movement and the camera work. It must be 4–30 seconds long and in MP4 or MOV format.
• Reference images that carry the look. Up to 20 can be used.

The output is a video at 480p, 720p or 1080p.

The pricing model in one formula

Credits are charged per second of video:

• 480p: 3 credits per second
• 720p: 7 credits per second
• 1080p: 11 credits per second

The formula is simply seconds × rate. For a script, that is easy to precompute before submitting anything. If you have a batch of clips, add up their durations, multiply by the chosen rate, and you have the credit budget for the batch. Take three clips of 6, 10 and 14 seconds, for example. That is 30 seconds in total, so the batch costs 90 credits at 480p, 210 at 720p and 330 at 1080p.

A two-pass approach

Because 1080p costs more than three times as much as 480p per second (11 versus 3), a two-pass pipeline is a reasonable pattern:

1. Run every job at 480p first.
2. Review the results and keep only the combinations of clip and reference images that work.
3. Re-run only those at a higher resolution.

That keeps the expensive runs for inputs you have already checked. This is a general cost-control pattern, not a feature of the service, so adapt it to your own needs.

Failures and refunds

Failed generations are refunded automatically. In a pipeline this means a failed job does not leave you out of pocket, but you will still want your code to handle the failure case, retrying or flagging it, rather than assuming every submission succeeds.

Credits and billing

Credits are bought as one-time packs. There is no subscription and credits never expire. That suits workloads that are bursty: you can buy a pack, run a batch and come back months later without losing the balance. Current packs are on the pricing page.

One caveat for early testing

Videos created before a first purchase are public in the Community section. If you are testing with material that should stay private, plan your tests accordingly, because the clips you use during early experiments may be visible there.

What to check before you integrate

• Do your clips fit the 4–30 second range and the MP4 or MOV formats?
• Is motion transfer what you need? The service does not make video from text.
• How many seconds will you generate, and at which resolution?
• How will your code handle a failed generation?

If those answers line up, the service itself is described at genjutsu.app.

— Genjutsu AI