Formats

What we ran

Thirty-nine pairs. The A take names a format and stops — "Elevator CCTV: three strangers riding in silence", "A 1948 film noir: a detective waiting in his office". The B take asks for the same format and then demands something it would never do: a crane orbit on the bodycam, six angles in the 1969 moon broadcast, audible dialogue in the silent film, a smartphone on the 1815 dinner table. Aspect and length were both on AUTO on purpose. What the model picks is part of the answer.

The board planned 40 pairs and 80 takes. The data holds 78 — pair 01 never landed, neither side. Everything below is the 39 pairs that did.

1A submarine documentary: tension in the sonar room — but staged as a sunlit pastoral picnic.

We read the contact sheet, then built an A-over-B frame strip for every pair (four frames each, at 8/34/62/90% of runtime) and read 26 of them. On top of that we measured every clip: container resolution and duration, cut count by ffmpeg scene detection above 0.30, mean and peak volume, seconds below −45 dB, and a frame-to-frame motion-energy figure that separates a glide from a shake. One limit worth stating up front — there is no transcription here. We can prove a clip got louder or went silent. We cannot prove the heron rhymed.

1Drone footage: a coastal cliff walk — but filmed entirely inside a small bathroom.

What happened

The format takes the frame. Every time.

Twenty of the 78 files came back 1088×800 — a 1.36:1 near-square — and not one of them is an accident. They are nine complete pairs: the elevator CCTV, the 1969 moon broadcast, the 1920s silent film, the 1950s classroom film, the 1993 VHS birthday, the 1948 noir, the WW2 newsreel, the 1965 8mm picnic, the 1940s propaganda reel. Plus the 1970s soap's A take, and the sitcom's B take, which drifted there on its own. Everything else stayed 1280×704. Nobody asked for either.

What triggers it is the capture format, not the century. "A period drama set in 1815" is 16:9 — it's a modern film about 1815. "8mm family film from 1965" is 4:3, because 8mm is a thing that recorded. Name the machine and you've named the frame.

The contradiction never took it back. 26 demands "pristine 4K clarity with no tape artifacts" and is still 1088×800. 30 demands "full color, stabilized, shot on a modern lens" — it delivers all three, in 4:3. Two clips in the whole family escaped, and both because the instruction itself named a frame: 44 asks for "anamorphic widescreen" and gets 1440×608 (2.37:1); 58 asks to be "framed like a shaky vertical phone video" and gets 704×1280, the only vertical file in the set.

1IMAX aerial cinematography: a mountain range at dawn — but framed like a shaky vertical phone video.

The format also buys runtime. Default is 10.04s. Formats that have to explain or dwell ran longer without being asked: the classroom film and the propaganda montage both at 15s, the slow-cinema long take at 20s, the onion tutorial at 20s, the weather forecast and the wedding reel at 15s. And it spends time the other way — 6, whose only job is "an artful rack focus from dashboard to horizon", came back at 5.04s, the shortest clip in the family. One beat, five seconds.

Inside that frame, the instruction almost always wins. Of 39 contradictions, 28 landed clearly on the channel they named. Three landed partly. Two were ignored outright. Six were audio-only claims we cannot check.

The wins are not timid. 52 empties a talk-show studio down to rows of blue chairs and 4.53s of measured silence. 56 opens on three wide shots of a dead auditorium before finding the man at the microphone. 78 cuts a hatch in a submarine and puts a meadow behind it. 24 gives the anachronism its own insert — a cutaway to a smartphone glowing among the 1815 silverware. 76 runs the onion backwards: dice, then halves, then a whole onion, hand retreating. 36 deletes its own broadcast furniture — the LIVE bug and the "NEIGHBORHOOD FLOODING / RIVERDALE" lower third both vanish when you ask for found footage with no anchor.

1A period drama set in 1815: a candlelit formal dinner — but a smartphone glows on the table.

What it never gives up is the camera. This is the sharpest split in the family. Ask the drone to shoot inside a bathroom (8) and you get a bathroom — glided through at drone speed, with drone smoothness (motion jitter 0.033, among the steadiest in the set). Ask the bodycam for "a smooth orbiting crane shot" (4) and the camera does orbit the car — on a fisheye, at night, at bodycam resolution, with the shake intact (jitter 0.274, no smoother than the A take's 0.234). It grants the move, not the machine. 16 is the same trade: warm even lighting floods the found-footage basement, and the handheld camera stays handheld.

Cutting is where it stops listening. 62 is the clearest failure in the family. The prompt reads "Slow cinema, one static long take: an old man drinking tea by a window — but a hard cut every single second." Ten seconds, zero detected cuts, one setup throughout. The only thing that moved was the runtime — the A take ran 20s, the B take 10s, so something registered and it wasn't the edit. 18 does better but not to spec: "cut rapidly between six different camera angles" produced four detected cuts and three visible setups, and cost the clip its continuous audio (4.93s below −45 dB where the A take has none). 22 is the one clean pacing win — "modern jump cuts and meme pacing" took a 1950s classroom film from 2 cuts to 7, era untouched.

1Slow cinema, one static long take: an old man drinking tea by a window — but a hard cut every single second.

And it will refuse a genre swap outright. 42 — "A live courtroom broadcast: a tense cross-examination — but it becomes a musical number" — is a straight cross-examination for the full ten seconds. No choreography, no staging change, no build. We sampled eight frames across the clip looking for a late turn. There isn't one.

Audio-only contradictions are the weak ones. The two we can measure both worked: 66 ("complete silence, no music at all") dropped from −17.2 dB mean to −47.0, with 7.78 of 10 seconds below the silence floor; 40 ("no laugh track") went quiet for 5.09s. The ones we can't measure show no sign in the picture, and one shows a sign against. 14 asks for "an upbeat sitcom laugh track" over a true-crime reenactment and came back 6.8 dB quieter than its A take. 34 asks a propaganda newsreel for "openly sarcastic self-aware narration" and returns a brighter, more heroic factory montage than the straight version. 38's horror score, 72's reversed speech, 2's first-person heron, 12's rhyming couplets — the audio track changes level, the image does not move at all. Note the asymmetry with 76: "shown entirely in reverse motion" reversed the picture completely; "he speaks in reverse" changed nothing you can see.

One more thing worth knowing: it renders broadcast chrome well. The esports overlay in 45 carries a "LIVE CHESS ARENA" title, two player cams and running clocks that count down plausibly (04:38, 04:36, 04:32, 04:30). The infomercial 47 burns in "STILL CHOPPING THE HARD WAY?", "DROP! CRANK! DONE!" and "MIRACLE PREP PRO" cleanly. Headline type holds. Dense secondary type does not — 50's weather columns degrade into "TUE AUG, 106" and "TUE AUG, 19".

Notable takes

62 | SLOWCIN 13B · old man, one long take — vs a hard cut every second | Asked for ten hard cuts, delivered zero. The format word owned the edit outright.

78 | SUBMARINE 40B · tense sonar room — vs a sunlit pastoral picnic | It didn't choose. Daisies and a checked blanket inside the sonar compartment, tea cups lit by the green scope.

46 | ESPORTS 23B · a chess match — vs in a Victorian parlour | It re-skinned its own overlay: "VICTORIAN CHESS OPEN / ROUND 3", nameplates reading MRS. NIGHTBROOK and LADYBISHOP, LIVE badge, chat rail — over a candlelit parlour.

1An esports livestream with overlay: a chess match — but set in a candlelit Victorian parlor.

8 | DRONE 21B · coastal cliff walk — vs filmed in a small bathroom | A hiker in a blue jacket walking past a bathtub, shot from a gliding aerial camera. The location went; the camera stayed.

58 | IMAX 06B · mountains at dawn — vs shaky vertical phone | The only vertical file in the family (704×1280), and jitter up 10× from the A take — but still an IMAX-clean aerial no phone could have taken.

49 | WEATHER 25A · five-day forecast — straight | Nobody contradicted this one. It printed "GENERIC FORECAST" and "LOCAL WEATHER DATA NOT PROVIDED" on its own graphic rather than invent numbers.

What this means if you're prompting FLUX.3

The format word is the strongest thing in your prompt, and its first act is silent: it sets the frame. "1993 VHS", "1948 film noir", "elevator CCTV", "WW2 newsreel" all come back 4:3 on AUTO. Modern surveillance doesn't — dashcam and bodycam both stayed 16:9. If you need 16:9 or 21:9 from a period format, say the frame explicitly; naming the shape is the one instruction that reliably overrode the format here.

It also sets the clock. Instructional and montage formats bought 15–20s on their own; a single focus move bought 5s. If length matters, don't leave it to AUTO alone.

Everything inside the frame is yours. Anachronisms, absences, wrong lighting, wrong location, direct address, reverse motion — those landed 28 times out of 39, usually completely, often with the model staging the contradiction properly rather than just tolerating it. Ask for the strange thing plainly and it will build a shot around it.

Two things you should not ask a format for. First, a different edit rhythm: "cut every second", "cut between six angles", "no cuts" produced 0, 4 and 1 cuts respectively. Cutting is the format's, not yours. If you need a rhythm, generate the shots separately and cut them yourself. Second, a genre swap on top of a live format — the courtroom musical simply didn't happen.

And write your contradiction in the picture, not the soundtrack. "Shown entirely in reverse motion" reversed the image; "he speaks in reverse" did nothing visible. Silence is the one audio instruction that reliably lands — both clips that asked for it went measurably quiet. Anything requiring a specific tone of sound — sarcastic, horror-scored, rhyming, laugh-tracked — leaves no trace we could verify, and one of them came back quieter than the take it was supposed to be louder than.

Last note on rerolls: aspect on AUTO isn't stable within a pair. 39 and 40 are the same 1990s sitcom; A came back 16:9 and B came back 4:3. If the frame shape matters, set it.