1080p vs 720p: the credit math on every engine in the studio

Every write-up on AI video pricing lives in dollars per second. Dollars per second is the vendor's number. It is not the number you spend when you press render. You spend credits, and the credit-to-dollar rate depends on the plan you are on. A piece on "1080p costs 33% more" is useless to a Creator subscriber who buys credits at 0.75c and useless to a Lite subscriber who buys them at 1.0c, because the dollar you cared about on the way in is already gone.

This is the credit math, engine by engine, at both resolutions, with the one engine where the jump is free and the one where you are quietly paying for pixels you can see from across the room.

The headline, up top

engine	480p / s	720p / s	1080p / s	720p → 1080p
Seedance 2.5	35	70	130	+86%
Seedance 2.0	22	45	70	+56%
Seedance 2.0 Fast	25	50	—	n/a
Kling O3 Pro	—	24 silent / 30 voiced	—	n/a
Veo 3.1 Fast	—	20 silent / 30 voiced	20 silent / 30 voiced	0%

Numbers are the per-second rate at voiced where the engine has a toggle, or the single rate where the engine prices by resolution and bills the same with or without audio. The two Seedance rows are reads of what the studio charges from the models.ts catalogue. Kling and Veo are the two engines with a silent-vs-voiced split.

The one surprise is the bottom row. Veo 3.1 Fast at 1080p is the same rate as 720p — and that is deliberate on our side because Google ships the two tiers at the same cost to us on the Fast rail. Everywhere else, pixels are a bill.

Why Seedance 2.5 jumps 86%

Seedance 2.5 at 480p is 35 credits a second. At 720p it is 70. At 1080p it is 130. That is close to double going each step up, and it is close to the raw provider rate: Seedance renders through Segmind at about half of fal's old price, and the credit cells are struck against the Segmind cost. 480p and 720p sit at a healthy multiple on Creator (2.46× and 2.20× respectively); 1080p sits at 1.66×. That last cell is the thinnest 1080p margin on the shelf, and it is deliberately thin — on Studio annual it would be under 1.3×, which is a reminder that 1080p on 2.5 is where the per-dollar price is most honest and least worth skipping if you are already paying for a motion-heavy render.

The practical read: on Seedance 2.5, pay for the resolution that matches where the clip will play. A 1080p render that gets downsized to a 9:16 phone post is 60 credits a second you never see. A 480p render used as a draft before the final 1080p pass is 35 credits a second you spend on purpose.

Why Seedance 2.0 is the middle lane

Seedance 2.0 holds a wider spread (22/45/70) and lands with 1080p at a flat 70. That makes it the lane where "render final at 1080p once I like the draft" costs the same per second as 720p on 2.5. Draft on 2.0 at 480p, lift the one shot you want to keep onto 1080p of the same engine, and you have paid 92 credits a second across the pair rather than 200 if you had rendered both passes at 720p on 2.5.

Why Kling O3 Pro is 720p-only

Kling O3 Pro does not expose 1080p in the studio. Not because the model cannot — Kling 3.0 does render 1080p — but because our Kling cell sits at 24 silent / 30 voiced, which is already the cheapest voiced second on the shelf and the row we promise characters hold across. Doubling it to a 1080p rate would double the thing people pick Kling for. If you need 1080p and a Kling-grade character hold, the move is to render on Kling at 720p and upscale downstream, not to swap engines mid-episode.

Why Veo 3.1 Fast is the odd one out

The Veo row is flat. 720p and 1080p both bill at 20 silent / 30 voiced per second. Google's Fast tier charges us the same for the two resolutions, so we charge the same, and 1080p becomes the free upgrade on the shortest engine in the catalogue.

The pricing is not the catch; the length is. Veo renders four, six or eight seconds, period. A reference-mode generation on Veo is pinned to eight seconds regardless of what the slider says. So the "free 1080p" lands on a shot that is at most eight seconds long and at most ingests three reference images.

The practical read: if the shot can live inside eight seconds and does not need more than three references, Veo 3.1 Fast is the one engine where you should always ask for 1080p. On every other engine, you are paying for the pixels.

A worked example, both ways

Six-scene story, 90 seconds total, mix of character shots and B-roll. Say five shots on Kling O3 Pro at 720p voiced (five × 15 seconds × 30 cr) and one shot on Veo 3.1 Fast at 1080p voiced (eight seconds × 30 cr). That is 2,490 credits total — which, on Creator at 0.75c, is $18.68. The 1080p shot on Veo rode in free.

The same story on Seedance 2.5 at 720p voiced across the board would be 70 × 90 = 6,300 credits. Lift it to 1080p and it becomes 11,700 — the exact same six shots now cost 4.7× the Kling-plus-Veo bill, for a resolution the audience will never notice on the two-second pacing serialized stories use.

Resolution is the second-biggest lever on a story's bill, after engine. Engine is first because the per-second rate is written against the engine, not the pixel count. If you are watching your credits, the first move is to pick the right engine and the second is to stop asking for 1080p where the engine charges you for it.

How we lay out an episode now

• Draft every shot at 480p or 720p, whichever the engine serves cheapest.
• Lift the one or two shots that will be the thumbnail or the hero to 1080p — on an engine that charges for it, this is a per-shot decision, not a project default.
• Any shot that can live on Veo 3.1 Fast at eight seconds goes to Veo at 1080p for free.
• Any Kling shot stays at 720p and gets upscaled in the editor if the post platform needs 1080p.

The free account comes with 300 credits: three 4-second drafts on Seedance 2.5 at 720p, or a full 10-second Kling O3 Pro voiced shot, or a 10-second Veo 3.1 Fast at 1080p with the pixels on the house. The best way to internalise which engine is worth which resolution is to run the first three renders on three different engines at three different resolutions and look at the clips side by side.

The one line the credit math does not cover

Resolution is a dial, not a flag. A 1080p render on an engine that was trained at 720p will not look better than a 720p render upscaled by a tool that was trained on 1080p output — it will just cost more. Spend the credit math where the engine was built to deliver the pixels, and spend the upscaler fee where it was not. The studio does not publish an upscale option because the economics are better off-site, and the catalogue page for every engine says the native resolution it renders at. Read the catalogue before the credit column.