AI Tools and Workflows · The register
A register, not a list: price, status, what the vendor says about training data, and the date we last looked.
A list of names answers none of the three questions people actually arrive with. Is it still current, what does it cost, and will my broadcaster let me use it. Every entry carries a date, because on this subject an undated entry is a wrong entry waiting to happen.
Prices are the vendor’s own list price as displayed in September 2026, in the currency the vendor displays. No product on this page has paid for its entry, and we hold no commercial relationship with any company named here. Where a vendor says nothing about its training data, we record silence as silence.
Why the date column exists
The worked example: a tool named in every brief this year is being switched off.
OpenAI’s own notice: the Sora web and app experiences were discontinued in April 2026, and the Sora API is discontinued on the 24th of September 2026. User generations are permanently deleted after the export window and no replacement is named. Any page that lists Sora as a current tool is already wrong.
Why, as reported by TechCrunch in March 2026 on a Wall Street Journal investigation: worldwide users “peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000”, the service was “burning through roughly $1 million every day”, and its largest announced partner, which had committed a billion dollars, is reported to have found out less than an hour before the public. Standardise on the decision process — rights, data, disclosure, liability — and treat the product as replaceable.
Sora: discontinued
Web and app, April 2026 · API, September 2026
General assistants
The three that are already in the production office.
| Tool | Price, September 2026 | Does it train on your material? | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT, by OpenAI | Free, Go, Plus and Pro tiers; Business per seat with a two-user minimum; Enterprise custom. API listed from $0.20 to $5 per million input tokens depending on the model. | The pricing page shows content used to train the models, with opt-out available, across tiers. Enterprise data handling sits on a separate page we did not open. | Live |
| Claude, by Anthropic | Pro $17 a month on annual billing, $20 monthly; Max from $100; Team $20 a seat; Enterprise $20 a seat plus API. | “None by default” on paid plans, with custom data-retention controls at enterprise. The cleanest published position of the three for unreleased material. | Live |
| Gemini, by Google | Free; AI Plus $4.99 a month; AI Pro $19.99, which includes Veo 3.1 and Flow credits; AI Ultra from $99.99 to $199.99. | The consumer page does not state business data handling and directs you to Gemini Enterprise. | Live |
The failure mode here is not on the shooting day, it is upstream and legal. A schedule, a crew list, a call sheet and a child-performer record are personal data, and pasting them into a consumer tier that trains on inputs is a processing decision. The second failure is confident wrongness: a generated breakdown invents a scene element, and a generated risk assessment omits the thing that makes a schedule legal.
Video generation
Nothing in this category is a shooting-day tool.
| Tool | Price, September 2026 | Does it state its training data? | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runway | Free with 125 one-off credits; Standard $12 a month on annual; Pro $28; Max $76 with 9,500 credits; Team, Enterprise and API by sales. | No training-data statement on the pricing page. HDR, ProRes and image sequences are gated to the $76 tier, which tells you where delivery sits in the vendor’s priorities. | Live |
| Veo 3.1, by Google DeepMind | Through Gemini AI Pro at $19.99 a month or Ultra; also by API. | The model page states nothing about training data, rights or watermarking. | Live |
| Higgsfield | Free; Starter $19 a month; Plus $59; Ultra $129; Team $79; Scale $169. | Nothing on commercial rights, licensing or training data anywhere on the site we opened. | Live. Runs other companies’ models, so ask whose licence applies |
| Luma | Plus $30 a month, $25 on annual; Pro $90; Ultra $300; Team and Enterprise by sales. | Commercial use granted from Plus upward. No training-data statement. | Live. Also an aggregator of other companies’ models |
| Pika | Free; Basic $8 a month, capped at 480p; Standard $28; Pro $76. | Commercial use on all paid tiers. No training-data statement. | Live |
| Kling, by Kuaishou | Could not verify: the pricing page served no content when we checked. | — | Live, and reachable through aggregators. Chinese ownership is itself a compliance fact for a broadcaster questionnaire |
| Sora, by OpenAI | — | — | Discontinued |
Where the category fails, from the vendors’ own stated limits: no timecode, no genlock, no lens metadata and no way to match a plate you shot an hour ago at a known stop. Every vendor advertises character consistency as a feature, which is the admission that it is not a property of the output. Generation is priced per short clip, so nothing here produces a scene. And for a high-end television deliverable the rights position is decisive: Netflix requires that tools cannot store, reuse or train on production data, and not one of these makes that commitment on the pages we opened.
Image generation
One vendor states its provenance. The rest are silent.
| Tool | Price, September 2026 | Does it state its training data? | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney | Basic $10 a month; Standard $30; Pro $60; Mega $120, with 20 per cent off annual billing. | No training-data statement. Any subscriber may use their images commercially, but companies over a million dollars of revenue must be on Pro or Mega — and privacy, which Midjourney calls Stealth Mode, is only on Pro and Mega. | Live. The default is public: on an entry plan, unreleased designs are being published |
| Adobe Firefly | Free; Standard $9.99 a month; Pro $19.99; Pro Plus $49.99; Team from $19.99 a seat; Premium $199.99. | The only vendor on this page that states provenance. Models “trained on licensed content from Adobe Stock and public domain content where copyright has expired”; it “does not train on users’ personal or generated content”; outputs are described as commercially safe with Content Credentials attached. | Live. Firefly now also routes to other companies’ models, and the commercial-safety claim does not cover those |
| Stable Diffusion, by Stability AI | Community licence free under a million dollars of annual revenue; an enterprise licence, custom priced, is required above it. | No training-data statement on the membership page. The licence is revenue-gated “regardless of the source of that revenue”. | Live |
| FLUX, by Black Forest Labs | API, open weights and enterprise. | No training-data information on the site. Open weights matter for production: the model can run inside a facility, on a private network, with nothing leaving. | Live |
| Nano Banana 2, by Google | In the Gemini app, Search, AI Studio, Vertex and Ads; no credit cost inside Flow, where it is the default. | Google states it couples SynthID with interoperable C2PA Content Credentials. Announced February 2026. | Live |
Where the category fails: it cannot hold a room. Generate the same interior from a second angle and it is a different interior, and nothing here produces measurable, buildable space. Period and cultural accuracy is pastiche, because the model has seen photographs of a period rather than the period. If a project’s rule is cleared provenance, the honest answers are Adobe’s own models or an open-weight model fine-tuned on material the production owns. Everything else is ideation only, which is where Netflix puts it.
Production, post and the office
Where the mature adoption actually is.
| Tool | Price, September 2026 | What the vendor states | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundry Nuke | Nuke $3,839 a year; NukeX $5,219; Nuke Studio $6,379; Nuke Render $462. | CopyCat trains on the production’s own frames: you supply the original and the fixed version, and it outputs a model you run over the sequence. No third-party training data and no upload of unreleased material. Licensing terms for individual Cattery models are not stated, which is a real procurement question for a facility shipping a client deliverable. | Live, Nuke 17.1 |
| iZotope RX 12 | Elements $99; Standard $399; Advanced $1,399. | Machine-learning modules including Dialogue Isolate, De-rustle, Repair Assistant and Spectral Recovery, running on your own material. | Live |
| DaVinci Resolve 21, by Blackmagic Design | A free version and a paid one. | IntelliSearch, Speech Generator, CineFocus, Face Age Transformer, Face Reshaper, Blemish Removal, Slate ID, UltraSharpen and Motion Deblur ship in the current version. | Live |
| Premiere Pro and After Effects, by Adobe | On the Adobe subscription. | A Generative Media tool inside the Premiere timeline, which routes to Firefly, Veo, Kling, Runway and Luma. Enhanced Audio, Separate Crosstalk and an After Effects assistant are in beta. | Shipping since September 2026. Check which model made the asset |
| Autodesk Flow Studio | The pricing page did not resolve when we checked, so the price is unverified. | Markerless motion capture, camera tracking, clean plates and character passes, exporting to Maya, Blender, Unreal and 3ds Max. Autodesk’s own stated limits: up to 30 seconds at 1080p and up to 50 references. | Live |
| Flawless AI | Not published. | An Artistic Rights Treasury under which “the actor reviews and consents to every change before release”; outputs stated to be fully owned by the customer; media ring-fenced to the project and not used for general training without separate explicit consent. The strongest rights position stated by any vendor we checked. | Live. Client logos are listed but no individual production is named, so a studio name here is a vendor claim, not a credit |
| Respeecher | Text-to-speech API at $2 an hour, with custom enterprise deals. | Strict consent mechanisms, transparent voice origin tracking and verification processes. Named credits include The Brutalist, Endurance, Emilia Pérez, Yellowjackets and Better Man. | Live |
| ElevenLabs | Free; Starter $6 a month; Creator $22; Pro $99; Scale $299; Business $990; Enterprise custom. | The pricing page states nothing about consent verification for cloned voices. Instant voice cloning starts at $6 a month, so a production’s policy cannot rely on cost as a barrier. | Live |
| Filmustage | Free tier covering 20 per cent of scenes on one project; Director’s Cut $55 a month or $660 a year; Enterprise custom. | Holds SOC 2 Type II and Trusted Partner Network membership with TPN Blue Shield — the only tool on this register that names screen-industry security accreditation, which is what a studio’s content-security team asks for before a script is uploaded. | Live |
| LTX Studio, by Lightricks | Free with 800 one-off credits, personal use only; Lite $12 a month; Standard $28; Pro $100; Enterprise custom. | Commercial licensing from Standard upward. | Live |
| Topaz Labs | Topaz Studio $399 a year or $45 a month on annual; Photo $199; Video $299; Gigapixel $149; Studio Pro $799 a year. | Standard plans include limited commercial use for organisations under a million dollars of annual revenue. Full commercial use requires a Pro licence, so a production company above that threshold on a standard plan is out of compliance. | Live |
| Cuebric, by Seyhan Lee | Unverified: the site served metadata only when we checked. | Generative 2.5D environments for LED volumes, launched February 2023. A generated backing has no true depth, so it holds for a locked-off or slow move and falls apart once the camera translates far enough for parallax to matter. | Live |
Categories
Whole classes of tool, because the judgement outlives the brand.
| Category | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Transcription and speech to text | Green | The clearest win of the lot, and the one with verified UK adoption at scale. Check where the audio is processed before uploading anything unreleased, and remember transcription still hallucinates — which matters now that it is the load-bearing layer under searchable rushes. |
| AI features inside editing, grading and compositing software | Green | Mature, contained, and running on your own material inside a tool you already licence. Nuke’s CopyCat is the strongest case in this whole register: you train it on your own frames, so there is no provenance question at all. |
| Upscalers and restoration | Amber | It invents detail, it does not recover it, and in quality control that shows. Never use it to hit a delivery specification you did not shoot for. Check the licence tier against your company’s revenue. |
| Storyboarding, previs and pitch generators | Amber | Fine for thinking, and Netflix expressly permits ideation, moodboards and reference. Do not pass generated boards off as an artist’s work, and do not build a board around a real person’s face. |
| Script breakdown and scheduling assistants | Amber | Finds most of the elements and misses the ones that cost money, and it does not know what makes a schedule legal. A first pass a human then does properly. Never upload an unreleased script to a service that trains on uploads, and ask for the security accreditation first. |
| Generative video and image inside a deliverable | Amber | Permitted by some commissioners as reference and ideation, and requiring written approval for anything close to a character, a key visual or a real likeness. Read the commissioner’s document before the tool’s. |
| Face and body replacement, and voice cloning of a real person | Red | Without specific, informed, revocable, paid consent this takes somebody’s likeness and their future work. It is also the category where UK consent is actively disputed, and where voice work is the worst-affected trade in Europe. |
| Fully generated footage sold as a finished shot | Red | Nothing available now holds continuity, performance and control well enough to be a shot in a drama. When something does, this rating changes. |
Marked unverified
Six things we could not confirm, listed rather than guessed.
Kling’s pricing
The site served no pricing content when we checked. Kuaishou ownership is verified; the commercial terms are not.
Unverified
Autodesk Flow Studio’s pricing
The pricing page did not resolve and the overview page rendered unfilled template variables instead of prices.
Unverified
Cuebric’s current specification and pricing
The site served metadata only. The 2.5D limit above is from the launch reporting, not from a current page.
Unverified
Metaphysic’s product names under DNEG
The acquisition by DNEG’s AI arm in February 2025 is verified. What the products are now called, and what they cost, is not. It matters because the leading photoreal-likeness capability now sits inside a London VFX house, so a production procures it as a VFX vendor, under a VFX contract, with the consent paperwork that implies.
Unverified
Runway’s partnership with AMC Networks
Only the announcement page title was reachable; the trade reporting was paywalled. We are not describing the detail of a deal we could not read.
Unverified
OpenAI’s enterprise data handling
The consumer pricing page states training with opt-out. Enterprise handling is documented elsewhere and we did not open it, so we are not asserting it either way.
Unverified
Traps
Every one of these has caught a production.
| The trap | What is actually the case |
|---|---|
| “We used Adobe, so we are covered” | Adobe’s commercial-safety claim is made for its own Firefly models. The generative panel now in Premiere routes to Veo, Kling, Runway and Luma, none of which states its training data. The question is which model produced the pixels, on which plan, under whose licence. |
| “The terms say it is fine” | Consumer plans routinely restrict commercial use, gate privacy behind a higher tier, and permit training on what you upload. The same brand on an enterprise agreement frequently does none of that. Read the tier the production is on, and read it again at renewal. |
| “We will standardise on this and train everyone” | Products are discontinued, sometimes at very short notice. Standardise on the decision process, not the product. |
| “It is used by a major studio” | A client logo on a vendor’s site is not a credit. Ask which production, in which department, and who at that production will say so. |
Checked against the vendor’s own published material or a named primary source in September 2026. Nothing here is rated from a launch video. If you think an entry is wrong, tell us with your reasoning and we will change it.