Deforum: The Wild West of AI Video

For a beginner's overview of Deforum, check out this great walkthrough video by Matt Wolfe here...

For an advanced rundown of Deforums features and settings, please check this video. Yes, it's long but Matt has kindly indexed it so you can jump to what you need!

Beginner suggestions for Deforum

Go slow. Start with default settings and change one thing at a time. That way if you get an error you know what went wrong.
Be gentle with settings. Try changing camera settings around 1, using settings like 0.8 or 1.2. In most movement settings, 1 is a setting that keeps the movement still. Anything slightly higher or lower than 1 will move the camera slowly.
Learn how to use the camera in 3d mode, don't bother with video input, interpolation or 2d mode. 3d is best.
You can start a generation, then check the first few frames in the output folder to see if it is working. If it is not you can cancel the generation and save some money. Use a small amount of frames to start, then as you feel confident grow the number of frames.
Once you get a good prompt and setting with Deforum and feel confident, try it in SDXL. Change the resolution to 1024x1024 and try it!

Prompting and JSON

Use the JSON decoder (linked in the info tab of Deforum) to determine if there is a problem with your prompt that throws an error. One common example is that you need a comma on every line... except the last one! If you put a comma on the last line of your prompt it will throw an error.

Guided Images and Init Images/Video

For guided images or Init Images you have a couple options. You can use a url from an image hoster or even Discord, but it must end with the image suffix, aka .jpg or .png.

For temporary storage for images and videos, Public servers can use the same method outlined here: https://learn.rundiffusion.com/img2img-batch-processing-with-controlnet/

For those with Creator's Club, simply reference the file like normal with /mnt/private/

Errors

Deforum is a complicated project! Try to review all your settings and make sure you didn't miss anything before reporting on Discord. Often times something is missing, like a bracket, or an extra space where it shouldn't be. Check your logs folder and the logs txt file for a better description of what your error is.

If you have tried this and still don't understand how to fix, please ask in the #Deforum channel on our Discord. For further troubleshooting you can also search the Deforum Discord https://discord.gg/deforum

For frequently asked questions, check Discord's FAQ here: https://github.com/deforum-art/deforum-for-automatic1111-webui/wiki/FAQ-&-Troubleshooting

Common questions addressed in the FAQ include "why is my video fuzzy" and "why is my video turning into a jigsaw puzzle".

Current issues:

Upscaling is not working.
Controlnet does not work on shared. For Creator's Club members you will need to disable Multidiffusion and Adetailer then reset your box to use Controlnet.

Video not looking the way you want?

Deforum is a complicated and POWERFUL tool. With great power comes great responsibility! Understand that to make great videos with Deforum will take lots of practice, troubleshooting and maybe even research. It is not a magic piece of software that everything you put in comes out amazing. But once you have mastered it, you will be able to create incredible videos that can't be made any other way!