Recon area
Candidates the watcher flagged, plus anything you drop in. This is the inbox of the Recon lane: vet each one on a fast, cheap pass, then promote the winners into the model registry or reject them. Run python tools/watch_models.py (or the scheduled task) to refresh it. See the watcher spec.
Kandinsky 5.0 Video Lite
Fast 2B draft-tier video. Bake off against HunyuanVideo 1.5 on a cast-rich song.
source →Wan-VACE
Core of the control rig (pose/depth/ref). Test a directed hero shot end to end.
source →OmniVoice
600+ language zero-shot cloning; the multilingual wildcard for the dub lane.
source →Wan-S2V
Audio-driven cinematic avatar on the Wan stack; paper reports it beats HunyuanVideo-Avatar and OmniHuman. Slots into the existing Wan setup, test next.
source →Fish Audio S2 / S2-Pro
Tops independent TTS benchmarks (paralinguistics), sub-100ms, 80+ langs. LICENCE non-commercial (research); commercial needs paid licence. Quality ceiling only.
source →Kimi K2.6
Top open coding model (~1T MoE, modified MIT); needs serious rented hardware. For big-GPU scripting runs.
source →Wan 2.7
UNVERIFIED: reported April 2026 with first/last-frame control and 9-grid input, but open-weight release NOT confirmed (Wan 2.5 was API-only). Confirm weights are actually open before adopting.
source →Cosmos3-Super-Text2Image
UNVERIFIED: claimed open T2I leader (~1219 Elo, 65B) from a single low-quality source. Needs primary confirmation before trusting.
source →Where candidates come from
Three kinds of signal, used together. The watcher automates the popularity scan; these add quality and practitioner judgement. The funnel stays: discover, rank, then vet on your own footage.
Leaderboards
Rank quality and preferenceQuality vs speed vs price across LLMs, plus video and speech arenas.
Trusted channels
Practitioner signal, ahead of the boardsTim Simmons tests AI video/image/audio tools honestly in real production; no tool-of-the-week hype.
AI filmmaking school and news; workflows, shorts and the weekly AI-film roundup.
Broad, hands-on open/local model coverage: Stable Diffusion, LoRA training, voice cloning, local LLMs, including uncensored and NSFW open models. Not just one category.