Reviewing an episode before it ships
Watching an episode straight through catches story problems and misses continuity ones. Continuity errors live at the joins, in the comparison between a shot and its neighbours, and between this episode and the ones before it. As of 2026-09-12.
| Pass | Catches |
|---|---|
| 1. Watch once for story | Pacing and clarity |
| 2. Step through cuts | Face and wardrobe drift |
| 3. Compare locations to the reference | Rooms that have changed |
| 4. Listen with picture off | Level and room-tone jumps |
| 5. Compare against episode one | Slow drift across the season |
Inclusion rule. Passes that catch different classes of error. A single viewing catches only the first. Order. Review order.
1Watch it once for story, then stop watching
Make the first pass the single viewing pass. Note pacing, clarity and whether the episode works, then put the story questions aside. Trying to judge story and continuity at the same time does neither well.
Everything after this is inspection rather than viewing, and it is faster done deliberately than by watching repeatedly and hoping something catches the eye.
2Check faces at every cut between characters
Step through each cut where a character appears on both sides and compare the two frames directly. Faces drift gradually across regenerations, and a drift invisible within a shot is obvious across a join.
Pay particular attention to cuts that span a regeneration, since those are where the two sides were produced at different times under possibly different conditions.
3Check wardrobe and props on entrances
Anything a character carries or wears should be checked at each entrance rather than continuously. A bag that appears and disappears between shots is the single most common continuity error in generated material and the easiest to catch this way.
The same applies to anything held: a cup, a phone, a weapon. Mid-scene changes are usually visible at the first frame of each new shot.
4Check locations against the establishing image
Compare each interior against the reference the location was established from, not against memory of the previous episode. Furniture, window position and wall colour drift quietly, and memory smooths them.
Where an episode revisits a location from several episodes ago, this check matters most and is most often skipped.
5Listen once with the picture off
Audio problems hide behind picture. Playing the episode without watching surfaces mismatched levels, joins where room tone changes, and dialogue that was regenerated at a different loudness.
It takes the length of the episode and finds a category of problem that visual review reliably misses.
6Compare against the previous episode, not the previous cut
Serial drift accumulates. An episode that matches the one before it can still have travelled a long way from episode one, which is what an audience bingeing the season actually experiences.
Once per few episodes, put a scene from the first episode beside the current one. Nothing else catches slow drift, and this check tends to change production decisions rather than just fix a shot.
7Check the joins between generations
Where two generations were joined to make one segment, the join is a seam the model never saw. Motion that continues across it, a hand that was moving, a head turning — all of these can jump by an amount that is small per frame and obvious at speed.
Step through four frames either side of each join. Most seams are either fine or plainly broken, and four frames is enough to tell which.
8Watch it at the size the audience will
A vertical drama reviewed full-screen on a large monitor hides the problems a phone reveals and invents ones it does not have. Faces that read clearly at full size can become mush at phone scale, and text can become unreadable.
Do the final pass at the delivery size. It is also the pass where burned-in captions and any corner marking get judged, because their placement only matters at that scale.
9Decide what not to fix
Not every found problem is worth a regeneration, and regenerating introduces its own risk of mismatching the neighbours. A small inconsistency that nobody will notice is cheaper to leave than to fix badly.
Write the decision down either way. An unrecorded decision to live with something comes back as a question in the next review, every time.
10Keep the notes with the episode record
What was checked, what was found, what was fixed and what was accepted. This is what lets a later operator understand why something looks the way it does rather than treating it as an error to correct.
It is also the record that turns a handover into a lookup. The review notes and the episode record are the same document seen from two directions.
11Where the register holds these tools
The techniques above are general craft. Which tools document support for them, and in what words, is held in the register, each cell carrying the page it was read from and the date.
- How the register is read — what counts as a documented mechanism here
Craft notes, not a register entry. No line here is attributed to a tool, and none should be read as a claim about one. The sourced material is on the register. Related: Planning a season, Regenerating safely.
12Continuity in practice
Serial work like “Checking an episode” depends on continuity; SceneMixer's guides describe how it keeps it:
That is SceneMixer's core design: characters live in a persistent asset library with locked reference art, and every segment that features a character is generated against those references — same face in episode 1 and episode 50.
SceneMixer, The AI Micro Drama Production Pipeline — “Can AI keep the same actors across 50 episodes?” (read 2026-10-13)
It is the reference every later segment points at, which is what keeps a character's face and a location consistent across an episode.
SceneMixer, Glossary — “What is a setup image for?” (read 2026-10-13)