The cinema
Press Develop and the line becomes the run — every frame on screen before one develops, skips named in your words, and a stop that states its cost.
Press Develop on a workflow and you stay on the screen you built it on. The line becomes the reel: one column per step, one lane per frame, and every frame the run will make is already on screen. You watch each piece split into its variations as they develop.
The cinema →What you are watching
The house decides the whole run before a token moves, and shows all of it. The header says the shape in one line — 24 frames from 6 shirts — and every frame holds a hollow slot from the first second. A slot is hollow while it waits, breathes while it develops, and settles into its picture when it arrives.
When a step turns one piece into several — a colourway step making four of one shirt — the new frames are drawn out of the finished one: the print resolves, the threads draw out of it one after another, and each new frame starts as a ghost of the frame it came from. The magenta on screen is always exactly where the work is now, and it moves left to right as the run advances.
Why there is no percentage
A developing frame has nothing honest to report until it resolves, and the house does not invent numbers. What it films is arrival. The line above the reel says what is moving — 5 developing · the oldest for 4 min — and each frame's arrival is its own announcement.
When a piece is skipped
A step can decline a piece, and it says so in your own word. Ask for a ruby colourway of a shirt that is already ruby and that cell reads already ruby — the words the line was built with, never a code. The thread runs straight through, and the lane still ends in a picture: when no step needed doing, the last frame shows the piece as it stands, under nothing needed doing. The header carries the sum — 6 frames skipped: 3 shirts are already red, 3 already grey — and skipped frames were deducted from the price before the run started.
A step that runs in your browser — a compress — is free, and its column says so.
When a frame fails
One failed frame ends its own lane and nothing else. The lane closes where it stopped, every other lane keeps developing, and the hold on the failed frame is released. Frames that already developed are yours and already settled — the run does not imply a refund it is not making.
What Stop does
Stop is one press in the reel's header. No dialog stands between you and the brake. It stops what has not started, and then it answers exactly: how many frames stopped, how many were already developing and will finish — and still cost — and how many tokens were released. What is shown is what settles.
Leaving and coming back
Close the tab at frame 9 and come back to frame 9. Finished frames are simply there, still — nothing replays, nothing re-animates. The running ones breathe and the rest wait hollow. An idle run costs the browser nothing: after one read on arrival the screen makes no requests, and each frame still lands the moment it develops.
From the chat
Ask the chat for the treatment and press yes, build it. You land in the same cinema, watching the same line.
Related
- Building the line: Workflows
- Every run, past and present: the Darkroom
- What a frame costs: quality and cost
Custom workflows
A line of steps that runs itself over a whole folder — fit, recolour, upscale, compress — with per-item judgement that skips the step a piece does not need.
The Darkroom
Everything developing at once — concurrent runs that survive a refresh, can be stopped and duplicated, with progress pushed to you rather than polled.