2-Week Report: Making AI Videos as a Complete Beginner
This isn't an "AI video tutorial." It's a real project's ledger review.
The project: Silent Era · The Guardian Volume 1 trailer. 50 chapters complete. Trailer plan: 5 min 10 sec, 44 shots, 82 first-frame / animation production units. Over two weeks, I primarily used Codex + gpt-5.5 for production planning, scripting, and batch processing, with switches to Claude Code + Claude Opus 4.7, opencode + MiMo, Qoder, and other tools.
Spoiler: the most expensive part of AIGC video isn't a single generation — it's rework, waiting, failure retries, and character consistency collapse.
Public Ledger
| Item | Data |
|---|---|
| Source Novel | Volume 1, 50 chapters |
| Trailer Plan | 5 min 10 sec |
| Shots | 44 |
| First-Frame / Animation PUs | 82 |
| Current Production State | 39 approved + 41 merged_to_i2v + 1 cut_from_edit + 1 revise |
| 6 Review Sessions | ~161 hours cumulative |
| User Prompts | 137 |
| Assistant Messages | 1,153 |
| Tool Calls | 2,541 |
| Tool Errors | 211 |
| Total Cost | ¥2,234.67 (incl. I2V estimate, as of 2026-05-22) |
| Agent Token Total | ~1 billion tokens (Codex 573M + Claude Opus ~421M) |
Why Costs Add Up
The ¥2,234.67 doesn't reflect a single smooth production pass. It reflects:
- Hundreds of failed first-frame generations (only 47.6% pass rate)
- I2V re-renders after motion artifacts in initial runs
- Agent tool-call errors (211 errors in 2,541 calls — an 8.3% error rate)
- Multi-agent context switching overhead
- The hidden cost of waiting: idle time between tool calls, model round-trips
Key Lessons After 2 Weeks
- Anchor locking is non-negotiable. Character consistency without locked anchors is expensive guesswork.
- Preflight before I2V. A first-frame that "looks good" may still fail I2V in specific, predictable ways. The 12-point gate catches them.
- Candidate caps are essential. Without a hard ceiling, "just one more try" becomes a money pit.
- Cost tracking must start day one. By day 14, you've forgotten half of what you spent.
Full Chinese original with detailed session breakdowns available at 我用AI Agent做视频的2周踩坑报告