video-engine-routing — when you outgrow your default engine

The default stack (see video-gen) assumes a subscription engine. This skill is the escalation path: what to do when credits run out, volume grows, or the pipeline needs control the subscription engine cannot give.

The decision tree

1. Under ~50 clips/month, mixed styles, no custom pipeline → stay on the subscription engine (Higgsfield or equivalent). Sunk cost, routing across many models, zero ops.
2. Bursty overflow or budget clips at volume → pay-per-use API (fal.ai). No subscription, no credit expiry, cheapest per-clip for budget models.
3. Custom pipeline: LoRA character consistency at batch scale, ControlNet/IPAdapter chains, motion transfer, community models → cloud ComfyUI (RunComfy machines or Comfy Cloud). You are paying for control, not per-clip price.
4. Local GPU rendering → only with a recent NVIDIA card with 16 GB+ VRAM. On an iGPU machine (Intel Arc/AMD APU, shared memory): never. Modern video models blow through shared-memory budgets, and quantized variants degrade video coherence. Cloud is faster and cheaper than wasted local hours.