I did start working on the shots for the storyboard and I found Nano Banana 2 suddenly started producing different results. Same seed and everything from the previous session as it was saved, but a different output, now with some background changes. 🤦‍♂️ They must have changed something again. So I decided to go through and build more controlable tools to stablize my workflow. I've already got a tool to fix up the Marble images, but I noticed their screenshots come out in a weird 1598x910 resolution, NEARLY 16/9 but not quite. It does not care if you are running on a 21:9 monitor or running fullscreen either, you're still getting that output. So I built a simple tool to take those images and match them to the Nano Banana 2 2MP sizing, which is an equally weird 2752x1536 (actually this is really 4MP 🤷‍♂️) and I'm standardizing everything on that for now. That was a quick one. The mask tool workflow I built last week worked quite well but I found myself going out to other image editors to tweak, which is fine, I'll still use it where it makes sense. NB2 still follows the prompts for character positioning and retains the best likeness compared to Flux 2 Klein. I tried cutting NB2 out of the loop but can't get there right now with Klein so I'm doing the characters seperately in NB2 then popping them into my compositor. The compositor has a load more elements off to the side but the screenshot would be silly looking so here I've lumped the staged outputs into one window. With this I can add characters (or props I suppose), size and position them against the background then when I'm happy with the screenspace composition I activate the second part of the workflow and it sinks them into the scene adding lighting and shadows where appropriate. Left is traditional image editing part, the right is the re-lit output.

I keep getting frustrated by the fact that many models and application platforms do not strictly respect 16:9 aspect ratios. This is a problem because if you want to export your final cut in a true 16:9 and the source video in not exactly 16:9 you will get small but annoying black bars on two edges. At least this is the case in my film editor, Filmora. It's even worse if you are joining several videos which have different aspect ratios, because then you get shifting bars which are terribly distracting and ugly. Probably those of you who are experienced already know how to fix this. But for newbies who may be struggling, I decided to write up this simple guide. The first rule is that you always want to EXPAND the 'too-short' direction rather than shrink the 'too-long' direction. This avoids problems with your post-processing software possibly getting confused. The first step is to divide the number of horizontal pixels by the number of vertical pixels. This ratio should be 16/9=1.777777... If the ratio is less than this, the frame is too narrow and it must be expanded horizontally. To do this, multiply the number of vertical pixels by 1.77777 to get the required number of horizontal pixels. Divide the just-computed required size by the current size and multiply by 100 to get the percent horizontal scaling to enter into your production software. If the ratio exceeds 1.777777 the image is too short and must be expanded vertically using the same basic idea. For example, suppose the image produced by the model is 2144 (horz) by 1216 (vert), The ratio is 2144/1216=1.763. It's too narrow. The required number of horizontal pixels is 1216 * 1.77777 = 2162. The horizontal expansion factor is 2162/2144*100 = 100.84 percent. On the other hand, suppose the model's image is 1928 by 1072. The ratio is 1928/1072=1.7985. It's too short. The required height is 1928/1.77777=1084. The vertical expansion factor is 1084/1072=101.12. If you want slightly greater accuracy in the calculations, use the exact ratio 16/9 instead of 1.77777, and carry out all calculations to the full calculator precision rather than rounding.

Well yes and no. I've been a bit busy recently but restarted the Storyboard bit for the 4th time last week and then ran into the next problem of getting the positioning of things really nailed down. Nano Banana 2 previously did this quite well but I don't know if it got updated and despite my best efforts, it would not position the character(s) part way down the corridor. Clearly I'm leaning towards being a bit of a control freak but I set about building a workflow based off an "inpainting" approach, using Flux 2 Klein to position things where I ORDER, ahem, tell it to position things. This, as with everything in this space, turned out to be more complicated under the hood than initially imagined. I won't bore you too much with the details but it seems AI diffusion models don't really understand space and layout like we do, so asking it to scale the characters to fit x or to size y isn't really understood. Gemini educated me on this one, but it's the same way they don't understand left and right reliably. Cutting a very long story short, the workflow I wanted was to be able to draw a mask on a background where I wanted a character(s) placed and have it put my characters there, scaled to fit the mask and not chopping off feet or heads... (there was soo much chopping off feet and heads and I had to build extras into the workflow to restrain it but I can do this fairly repeatably now finally! This is pretty much prompt free to integrate a pre-posed character into an existing background. I've not not tried taking them from a character sheet(s) straight into a position in a scene yet, that might work but isn't as important I don't think. 🤔 Anyway, still at the "building tools" stage! I'm hoping to get some storyboard stuff done this weekend. Here's a before/during and after.

Think I have downloaded just about everything that I can.

I hope that this information will provide you with enough info regarding my video project that you can understand the process in which i was using & attempting to achieve even though weather got in the way & wreaked the 1st floor of church to the tune of at least 2/3 to over 1 million dollars in damage. That is where all of my equipment is located & it will take several months to return some kind of normalized life as we once knew. Anyway, I plan on attending that last few Zoom sessions to the end.....My video was a first generation cell phone copy & that is all I have of the project when the storms hit with 5 1/2 to 7 inches of rain in 1 1/2 hours last Friday evening. Thanks again Mark for all of your hard work!