Trusting a Local-Running Model Demo

You run an open-weight video model on your laptop, it produces a beautiful shot, you plan the whole project around that capability. Then the project grows: you need a hundred shots, you need consistency across them, you need reliability. Local-model demos don’t scale — what feels like a clever trick on one shot becomes a serious infrastructure project at production volume. The fix is honesty about the gap: a demo proves a look is possible, not that a pipeline is viable. Before committing, budget the real cost of scaling the approach.

See also: ../../practical/ on cost management and reproducibility.