What It Costs to Animate a Hentai or Manga Comic Page With AI

The short answer

One moving comic page costs about $1 on OurDream and about $1.37 on Secrets, on their yearly plans.

That's for five seconds. Ten seconds doubles it. Animate every page of a 12-page comic and the bill moves from pocket change to a proper night out.

The rest of this guide follows Marcus through each step, so the numbers make sense before the coins are gone.

Step one: the still comic is the cheap part

Marcus built his comic in OurDream Comic Studio. He picked two characters, chose Manga BW Inks out of nine art styles, planned twelve pages and described each scene in plain words. OurDream drew the pages, lettered the speech bubbles and put everything in order.

Every still image costs 5 Dreamcoins.

That is the range. One image a page is 60 coins. Four images a page is 240. Premium gives him 1,000 coins a month for $9.99 a month on the yearly plan. The whole comic used a small slice of that.

Text chat with Rin while he planned the story? Free on a paid plan. The comic itself was the cheap bit.

The moving page is where the money starts.

Step two: making page seven move

On OurDream, any page of a comic can become a short film.

Video costs 100 Dreamcoins for every 5 seconds. That's the same price as 20 still images.

So Rin's look over the shoulder, five seconds long, costs 100 coins. On Premium yearly that is $9.99 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = $1.00. If Marcus wants the full ten seconds, with her smile arriving at the end, that is 2 × 100 = 200 coins, which is $2.00.

He went with five. The smile could stay in the reader's head.

His month now looked like this:

Plenty left for issue two.

The same moment on Secrets

His friend Theo does things differently. Theo uses Secrets AI.

Secrets works one frame at a time. Theo keeps his anime companion locked in the Character slot of the Generation Studio, sets the action, outfit and scene, and makes one image for "before" and one for "after."

Each image costs 50 Moments.

Then Secrets fills the gap. The video tool takes a start frame and an end frame and animates the moment between them. A 5-second Cinematic clip costs 1,200 Moments.

So Theo's version of the over-the-shoulder look is the two frames plus the clip.

Premium gives him 8,000 Moments a month. The yearly plan bills $109.99, which the price tile prints as $9.17 a month.

Six of those looks are 6 × 1,300 = 7,800 Moments, with 200 left from the 8,000. Theo still has to letter and lay out his own pages, but he gets a lot of say in exactly where the motion starts and stops.

Read more on Secrets AI Shorts and the Secrets review.

What one moving page costs, side by side

Here's the price of five seconds of motion on each plan, if every coin or Moment goes to video. The last column is the plan price divided by the balance, then multiplied by what one clip spends. Each result is rounded to the nearest cent.

Secrets prints $9.17 on the yearly tile. The bill is $109.99, so the clip sum uses that bill, not the rounded tile.

Out of coins halfway through the month? OurDream sells top-ups.

The yearly plans win, every time. Monthly billing doubles the price of the same five seconds.

Where the money really goes

Two weeks later, Marcus got ambitious.

Issue two was another 12 pages. This time he wanted every page to move. Ten seconds each. A full motion manga.

He did the sums before he hit generate.

Premium's 1,000 coins cover less than half of 2,400. Two 1,000-coin packs add the rest.

Deluxe made more sense, and cost less. The whole motion manga fit, with 2,600 coins left for stills, issue three and a few late-night retries.

That's the pattern with animated comics. The still pages are cheap. The motion is where the money goes. One moving page is a treat. Twelve moving pages is a plan upgrade.

Three ways people animate a comic

Most people land in one of three habits. Here's what each one costs on OurDream.

The one-page tease is one page moving and the rest staying still. Usually the turn, the look, the moment right before everything changes. It fits inside Premium many times over.

The highlight reel is three pages: the first meeting, the turn and the last page. It still fits inside one month with room for stills and a second comic.

The full motion manga is every page, ten seconds each. That's Deluxe territory, or a stack of top-up packs.

The one-page tease is the sweet spot for most readers. One moving panel in a still comic hits harder than twelve moving panels in a row. People notice the page that breaks the pattern.

Make the coins count

Marcus learned a few things the expensive way. He'd happily save the next person the bill.

Animate the turn, not the payoff. The moment just before something happens is the one that makes readers lean in. The payoff often works better as a still.

Five seconds is usually enough. A look, a hair flick, a hand on a shoulder. Ten seconds is for slow, cinematic moments only.

Get the still right first. If the page isn't right as a still image, moving it won't fix it. Reroll the still at 5 coins before spending 100 on the video.

Pick the yearly plan. Same coins, half the price per second.

Watch the balance after the first clip. One look at the coin count tells you how many more moving pages this month can take.

Frequently asked questions

Rin's page, a week later

Marcus put issue one on the OurDream shelf with one moving page. Rin turning to look back, five seconds, 100 coins.

That was the page people commented on.

He never animated the payoff. He didn't need to.

Keep reading

Browse OurDream comicsThe shelf the finished comic sits onOurDream reviewPlans, Dreamcoins, and Comic StudioSecrets reviewMoments, frames, and the yearly billHow credit billing worksThe subscription and the second balanceVoice vs videoWhat a clip costs next to a voice note

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