u/Manas_Patait

So image-to-video is the most controllable way to work imo - you lock the look in the still, then animate - so this is where i spend most of my time.

Kling is the current standout for pure i2v motion and physics, genuinely impressive and reasonably priced.

Runway's i2v is smooth and reliable but credits go fast. Luma Dream Machine is quick and fine for simple moves. where a studio tool helps: if you're animating a series of stills that need to feel like one piece, Morphic lets you bring images onto a canvas, animate them, and assemble on a Compose timeline, plus train a character Model so a person animated across multiple stills stays the same.

Seedance 2.5 taking up to 50 reference inputs is useful for keeping the look locked.

honest con: for a single animate this one photo job, Kling or Luma is faster and you don't need the workspace.

What is your current process and how many images are you animating - one, or a whole sequence?

Being honest about my actual workday: most of my analysis is me prompting claude and chatgpt, sanity-checking the output, and cleaning it up. The team doesn't really look under the hood, as long as the deck shows up on time, everyone's happy.

So basically my senior is older, doesn't touch the AI tools, kind of hand-waves the whole thing but he's the one who takes what i produce and pitches it up the chain. So on paper he looks like the strategist, and I look like the guy pushing buttons.

I am wondering if they realize that all this is coming from a model, im cooked fr.

My honest guess is the person who gets replaced isn't the one using AI, it's the one who only repackages it and adds no judgment, which… might be him, not me?

I am making my first pitch deck for my startup, looking to raise a pre seed round.

building a niche Saas tool for consumers and want my pitch deck to stand out.

Should I add character illustrations or creative infographic in my pitch deck to make it interesting? and if yes which tool or platform should i use for deck?

Being honest about my actual workday: most of my analysis is me prompting claude and chatgpt, sanity-checking the output, and cleaning it up. The team doesn't really look under the hood, as long as the deck shows up on time, everyone's happy.

So basically my senior is older, doesn't touch the AI tools, kind of hand-waves the whole thing but he's the one who takes what i produce and pitches it up the chain. So on paper he looks like the strategist, and I look like the guy pushing buttons.

I am wondering if they realize that all this is coming from a model, im cooked fr.

My honest guess is the person who gets replaced isn't the one using AI, it's the one who only repackages it and adds no judgment, which… might be him, not me?

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I recently helped someone think through this recently and the second half turned out to be more useful than the first. I would automate these:

1/ appointment reminders. the day before and two hours before. this alone fixes most of the no show problem.

2/ rebooking prompts. someone who visited every five weeks and has not been in seven weeks is your highest value message of the day.

3/ stock levels on the ten products you run out of. not all of them, ten.

4/ end of day totals so you are not adding up receipts at 9pm.

would not automate:

1/ the booking conversation itself. people booking a haircut want to ask a question about it, and an automated flow loses the upsell every time.

2/ complaints. never. one bad automated reply to an unhappy customer costs more than the whole system saved.

3/ the first message to a new customer.

4/ anything involving pricing exceptions, which in a salon is most pricing.

TLDR: automate the things you would forget, keep the things people would notice were automated. salon owners, what would you move between the two lists?

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Iam getting bombarded with I'll optimize your profile dms ranging from $99 to $1500. Some have testimonials that look real, most look like the same web template. Before I light my money on fire: has anyone paid for one of these and gotten measurable results (recruiter inmails and all? or is this a diy-with-free-tools situation?

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I work with FMCG (CPG) companies and anyone who works with them, knows how bad their templates are.

Client sends over their master template which is from 2017. The title slide has a gradient, the body font is arial and the heading font is something they paid for in 2014. there are four approved colours and two of them are the same grey. The analysis is pretty granular but it's going to land in a room looking like a training module from a bank.

What I did the second time was build it properly in gamma first so i could see what it should look like, then rebuild it in their template, which was pointless and made me sad but did tell me what i was losing.

I know some of the client teams use slides directly from my deck, so uniformity matters. Is there a way out of this?

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Not asking for today - today already happened and it went how you'd expect 🚁 😭 but it keeps happening. A meeting gets brought forward, someone drops out, and suddenly you're presenting in half an hour with a document and no deck.

My instinct is to open PowerPoint and start building, but half an hour isn't enough to build anything, so I end up talking over a wall of text.

We've got gamma through work and i've only ever used it for the not-so-serious stuff and i don't know whether that's the move under time pressure or whether it shows - whether a room can tell the difference between a deck you made in ten minutes and one you made in three hours.

What's the actual play here? do you go no-slides and just talk if its too last minute?

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I've been trying to build a budget and it's absurd. Most platforms give you ~N videos per month with no model or resolution attached, which is meaningless when the good model costs 25x the cheap one.

I found exactly one that publishes a full per-model, per-resolution rate card including the weird bits, minimum charges, reference video billed on input length as well as output. Everyone else makes you find out by spending.

Is opaque credit pricing just accepted now? does anyone else publish real numbers?

I'm starting to think taste is the last non- automatable step and everything else is just plumbing.

Where did yours break?