Make it both ways
Pick what you're making, how you'd generate it, and how you'd shoot it. The comparison updates as you go, and every number shows its likely range.
What you're making
30 s
The AI version
Every take you throw away still used a GPU. This ratio drives the AI footprint more than any other setting.
The conventional version
Factors come from the UK government's 2025 conversion factors, BAFTA albert, and AdGreen. Costs here are rough: crew at $700 a day plus 30%, flights, hotels, and VFX by shot type.
Counts flights with their high-altitude warming effect, food, materials, waste, and post. This is the fair match for AI's all-in compute number.
Scene by scene
Some scenes are expensive to shoot, and some cost almost nothing extra. Each comparison counts only what the scene adds to a shoot that's already happening, and uses the AI model you picked above. Badges compare AI with the lower of the two other options.
Anyone can generate. Few people can shoot.
Annual CO2e on a log scale. Each gridline is 10×. Teal is AI generation, amber is production, and violet is one person's whole year.
How AI filmmaking actually works
Nobody generates a shot once. How many takes a production throws away changes the answer more than which model it uses.
| How people work | Takes per kept shot | Generated seconds per finished second | Example |
|---|
Professionals mostly start from prepared images and animate them, a workflow called image-to-video. In long-form studio work, AI shows up mainly in previz, crowds, environments, and individual VFX shots. House of David generated about 20 takes for every AI shot it used.
Seedance's own benchmark rates image-to-video clips lower, clip for clip, than text-to-video. Prepared images help with continuity across shots, which benchmarks don't measure, so the calculator leaves the take ratio up to you.
"Unlimited" plans deserve suspicion. Artlist, Runway, Higgsfield, and Krea have all run unlimited Seedance windows, which make one more take free to you while its energy stays exactly the same. This site counts generated seconds, never spend.
Money is its own question. Generation is cheap, and people are the expensive part. Svedka's AI Super Bowl ad is the cautionary tale: the brand's CMO said it "didn't save much money and certainly not a ton of time."
Draft first
65–80%
less energy per kept shot when you explore at 480p and render only the keepers at full resolution. A Seedance 2.5 draft costs 18% of a 1080p render. Cheap drafts can invite more drafts, though.
Generate lower, upscale locally
<1 Wh
to upscale a 5-second clip with a lightweight model on a laptop. A diffusion upscaler such as SeedVR2 can use about 125 Wh for the same clip, which wipes out the saving.
Local isn't greener by itself
3 Wh
per FLUX image on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, against about 1.3 Wh on an RTX 4090 and under 1 Wh on a data-center GPU. Local tools help only when they replace cloud video generations.
Guided platforms like Krea
Krea hosts every Seedance and MiniMax tier alongside cheap exploration tools: a realtime image costs about 1/2,000 of a Seedance clip in Krea's own units, and its node editor shows the cost of each step and skips work that hasn't changed. If you use that layer to settle on a shot before paying for premium video, it plausibly saves energy. Nobody has measured it, though, and realtime video and agents keep GPUs busy for the whole session.
Voices and music
Local text-to-speech and music models use under 2 Wh per minute of audio. Turning off a video model's own audio saves only what the model spends on it, which is about 21–34% of compute for LTX-2. Seedance 2.5 and MiniMax H3 generate audio in the same pass and don't discount silent clips.
How the numbers work
No video company publishes energy per clip, so the AI side is always an estimate. Here's what each estimate rests on.
AI energy, carbon, and water
Energy per generated second starts from GPU time. For Seedance 2.5, three methods agree at 17–24 Wh per second on the GPUs at 720p: OpenRouter's latency benchmark, a calibration against Jegham, Gamazaychikov, and Luccioni's 2026 estimate for Seedance 1.5, and ByteDance's reported 70% gross margin. We use 18 Wh. MiniMax H3 is anchored on MiniMax's own benchmark for the open-weight model.
We then add servers, idle capacity, and data-center cooling (Google's 2025 serving study found the full stack uses about 1.7× the GPU energy), apply the grid where the model runs, and add hardware manufacturing and a 5% share for training. Water counts cooling at the data center plus the water used to generate its electricity.
Ranges combine each factor's own uncertainty. The takes ratio isn't part of the range because you set it.
We timed MiniMax H3 through MiniMax's own API, which reports when each job starts running. A 2K clip took about 1.7× as long as 768p, close to the 1.5× we assume, and 15-second clips cost about 15% less per second than 5-second clips. Timing Seedance 2.5 through resellers measured mostly queueing, so it can't pin down Seedance's compute.
Conventional production
Benchmarks come from the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance (US studios, 2023–24), BAFTA albert (UK), AdGreen (advertising), and Ecoprod's Carbon'Clap (France). They measure different things: the US studio benchmark counts fuel, utilities, flights without their high-altitude warming effect, and hotels, while the others also count food, materials, waste, and post. The scope switch adjusts for that gap.
Industry benchmarks leave out VFX rendering, and it isn't small. Weta's AWS rendering for Avatar: The Way of Water alone comes to roughly 8–28 GWh. The custom shoot builder lets you add VFX shots at 0.15–5 MWh each.
Factors
| Factor | Central | Range | Source |
|---|
Numbers to stop quoting
- MIT Technology Review's 3.4 MJ for one five-second video is about 5× higher than ML.ENERGY's measurement of what appears to be the same model on the same GPU.
- "Native 4K" for Seedance 2.5 appears in press coverage, but BytePlus's API tops out at 1080p.
- Weta's 3.3 billion thread-hours for Avatar: The Way of Water covers only the rendering done on AWS, not the whole film.
- Several "AI statistics" sites publish invented production-carbon figures. None of them appear here.