AI Movie Trailer Generator:
Models, Shot List and Real Costs

Topview T1 for most of the shots, at $0.22 a second at 1080p, and Seedance 2.5 for the fast action beats, at $0.585 a second at its official API price. Topview launched T1 as its own model on October 21, 2026, pitched at 62% lower cost than Seedance 2.5, and announced it with a trailer-style film presented as T1 output. On Topview's developer API the discount is smaller: T1 is listed there at $0.1649 a second at 720p, 28.66% off Seedance's official price. For a trailer, the 2.66x more seconds per dollar go into retakes: dozens of short shots, each of which has to match the ones around it.

The caveat is speed. In same-prompt comparisons Seedance 2.5 keeps running bodies and impacts crisper, and an anime creator testing T1 found its shapes turned slightly soft in fast motion. A trailer usually has a few of those shots, and they tend to be the ones people remember.

A trailer is many short shots that must look like one film. What follows is our working advice from cutting generated footage, not a measured result.

• Shot count. A trailer runs on cuts of one to three seconds, so even a short one needs dozens of shots, and every shot is a generation that can fail. Cost per attempt adds up faster than in any other genre.
• The same characters every time. Fast cutting makes any drift in a face, a costume or an age obvious. Attach one reference pack to every shot; T1's launch film lists up to 50 multimodal inputs per request.
• One look. Grade, lens, era and weather have to match across shots generated separately. Write the look once and paste it into every prompt, word for word.
• Title cards. Generated lettering is unreliable. Make titles, credits and the release date in an editor.
• Sound. A trailer is cut to one piece of music, with a few lines of dialogue on top. Use generated dialogue and ambience, and lay the score over the edit yourself.
• Pacing. Slow open, faster montage, a hard stop on the title, one last shot after it. That structure comes from the edit, not from the model.

Topview's own launch film is the best evidence: about a minute of two genres, cut like a trailer, with more than twenty cuts. It is a promotional film, chosen to show the model at its best, so treat it as an upper bound.

The first half is a period drama aboard a ship: officers in dress uniform raising a glass in a gilded dining saloon, a young maid, a gun drawn on an older man in a dim corridor, a blue-lit interrogation and extreme close-ups of eyes. The second half is a western: riders silhouetted against desert light, a lone cowboy on horseback, and an older rider beside a young woman, both in wide-brimmed hats. Short subtitled lines of dialogue run through it, and Topview lays its feature captions over the shots. Faces stay consistent within each story, and the two halves each hold one look.

The side-by-side below shows the comparison a trailer maker cares about. It comes from Topview's launch campaign, and several of the launch-week posts are marked as paid promotion, so let the footage, not the posts, make the case.

It plays like a zombie trailer in miniature: an infected man grabbing a victim by a fence, survivors running past burning houses and cars, figures walking out of the smoke, then a top-down aerial over an autumn crossroads and a wide aerial of the suburb at sunset. The quiet aerials look alike on both models. In the street chase, the running survivors stay sharper on Seedance 2.5.

Draft the whole trailer on T1, then re-render the action beats that come back soft on Seedance 2.5.

Re-render with the same prompt and references, so the new take still cuts with the shots around it.

A 90-second trailer at 1080p, with three takes per shot, is 270 seconds of generation: $59.40 on Topview T1 or $157.95 on Seedance 2.5 at its official API price. We assume three takes: quiet shots often work first time, action shots rarely do.

Few trailers keep every shot on T1, so read that saving as a ceiling. If 20 seconds of the trailer are chases and fights you render on Seedance 2.5, it costs $81.30: 70 seconds on T1 at three takes ($46.20) plus 20 seconds on Seedance 2.5 at three takes ($35.10). That is still about half the all-Seedance price.

Write the trailer in beats, then shots, and paste one look block into every prompt. An original example: a lighthouse keeper on a remote island starts hearing tomorrow's shipping forecast on her radio.

1. Cold open, two or three slow shots. The island at dawn from the air; the lamp turning; her hands tuning an old valve radio.
2. The world. Gulls, a supply boat, the keeper writing in a logbook.
3. The turn, one line of dialogue. The radio announces a storm and a ship's name; she looks at the date on the logbook.
4. Montage, eight to ten shots of a second or two. Waves over the rocks, a ship's bow in fog, her face lit by the lamp, a flare in the dark.
5. Title card, made in the editor, on a hard cut to silence.
6. The button. One short shot after the title: the radio switches itself on.

The look block, pasted into every shot:

Look: shot on film, muted teal and amber grade, overcast North Sea light, shallow depth of field, widescreen.
Character: a lighthouse keeper in her sixties, long gray braid, yellow oilskin coat. Match the reference images.
Sound: wind, surf, radio static. No music.

Leave the music out of the prompts and add one track over the edit, so the cuts land on its beats.

For the full price and quality comparison, read Topview T1 vs Seedance 2.5. For horror and apocalypse trailers, see the AI zombie video guide; for the action beats, the AI fight scene guide.

The free AI genre video prompts skill has trailer shot lists and prompts, and the free Topview T1 skill prices each shot on both models before your agent renders it. Topview T1 is also in AdAnt, an AI social media marketing team: choose it in Studio's video picker or ask the Creator for it by name. AdAnt charges 60% fewer credits per second for T1 than for Seedance 2.5 at 1080p and 54% fewer at 720p, and its T1 works from a prompt or a start frame rather than reference images.