The Master Guide / 00 Start here
Before you start: accounts and tools
Open these accounts and set up these tools before your first job. Plans and prices are platform facts: check them live before you pay.
Open these accounts and set up these tools before your first job. Plans and prices are platform facts: check them live before you pay.
Accounts
Higgsfield, on a paid plan. It carries Seedance 2.5 for video, Sync-3 for lip sync, Higgsfield's video analysis and the three stills models: Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image, and Seedream 5.0 Pro, which needs the paid plan. Its spend is counted in Higgsfield credits (cr) (see Tools at a glance → Each job, its tool, its label and its chapter).
Your own ElevenLabs account, on a paid plan: Eleven v4 for every voice, Scribe v2 for transcripts and the back-check of every take, and Sound Effects for designed sounds. Price it in ElevenLabs credits or US dollars, never in Higgsfield credits (see Voice and Arabic dialects → The voice route).
Suno Pro or Premier, in the web app. Commercial rights need each song to be generated and downloaded while you are subscribed; songs made on the free plan never gain them (see Music → Downloads and the licence).
A paid Google API key for Gemini, which reads takes for you. On the free tier, Google's terms let it use what you upload (see The quality bar → Judging motion honestly).
On your computer
An editor: Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. Resolve's free version has the scopes and the tracker the Guide uses.
After Effects, for artwork tracked onto a moving product, and its tracker for reading camera moves.
Audition, or another audio editor with a spectrum view, for the placed voice, the noise floor, mono and the phone band.
An EBU R 128 loudness meter.
ffmpeg and ffprobe, run from a terminal. Most "Do it yourself" blocks use them for frame exports and the delivery check (steps below).
An image editor that crops without resampling, for checks at full size.
Once per project
The folder and its three project files (see The stages and gates → Project files and folders).
Then read
The "New to directing with AI" path in Start here → Reading paths, or, if you already work this way, Start here → The house rules on one page.
Do it yourself
Install ffmpeg and ffprobe (Terminal; ffprobe comes with ffmpeg)
On a Mac with Homebrew:
brew install ffmpeg
On Windows 10 or 11:
winget install --id Gyan.FFmpeg -e
On Ubuntu or Debian Linux:
sudo apt install ffmpeg
Or download a build from the links on ffmpeg.org.
Close and reopen the terminal, then confirm both answer:
ffmpeg -version
ffprobe -version
Open a terminal in a folder (Terminal)
The commands in each block run on the files in the folder the terminal is open in.
On a Mac: open Terminal, type cd and a space, drag the folder onto the window, and press Return.
On Windows 11: right-click inside the folder in File Explorer and choose Open in Terminal.
On Linux: in most file managers, right-click inside the folder and choose Open in Terminal; otherwise type cd, a space and the folder's path.