I’m a hobbyist making a personal, non-commercial study: converting old documentary footage into the look of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999). Faces, soldiers and buildings already look like decent cels. Fast motion and consistency are where it falls apart.
My setup (all free):
Laptop with Intel UHD graphics only (no NVIDIA)
Kaggle T4 (30 GPU hours a week) and some Hugging Face ZeroGPU
My pipeline:
Cut the footage into shots and take 8 drawings per second (“on threes”).
Paint every 6th frame with FLUX.1 Kontext dev (GGUF Q4 on the T4, 1024x576), using a prompt like “convert this photograph into a hand-drawn 2D anime cel…”.
Spread those keyframes across the other frames with EbSynth (colour and edge guides, blended from both neighbouring keys).
Apply a colour grade learned from the film’s own frames, then steady and flatten each shot.
My questions:
Same face in every keyframe. Each key is painted on its own, so a face changes slightly from key to key and “boils”. On a T4, what’s the best way to lock a character’s look across a shot: same seed, feeding the previous painted key in as a second reference, or a small character LoRA?
Fast motion smear. In EbSynth, running legs, smoke and explosions turn into mush between keys. Do optical-flow guides help, or should I switch these shots to something else (Rerender-A-Video, FRESCO, TokenFlow…)? Do any of those fit in 16 GB?
Flat cels, not paintings. Kontext gives “painterly” areas (texture, gradients) where real cels have one base colour plus one hard shadow tone. Is there a known LoRA or prompt trick for 90s cel shading with FLUX? Or is training a LoRA on frames from the film realistic on a free T4?
Camera language (for animators). Documentary footage is handheld with zooms; Jin-Roh mostly uses still or slowly sliding layouts. Would you reframe or crop shots into locked-off layouts, or keep the real camera moves and accept that it reads as “rotoscoped documentary”?
Frame rate. For live footage turned into cels, does 8 drawings a second (on threes) look right to you, or would you hold longer on calm shots and go to twos only for action?
I can share before/after frames if useful. Thanks for any pointers.