AI Camera Control

Most AI video tools were trained on internet motion — handheld, random, sometimes pretty, sometimes nausea-inducing. The result is generations where the camera does whatever it wants regardless of what you asked for. Tell a generic image-to-video model to dolly in slowly and you might get a slow push, a fast zoom, a dolly-out, or a lateral pan — sometimes within the same shot. For social-first content where one motion is enough, that randomness is tolerable. For narrative work, branded campaigns, or anything cut against a real edit, randomness is the deal-breaker.

The newer cinematic-class models — Sora 2, Kling 3, Runway Gen-4, Google Veo — added explicit camera control as a core feature. You can write "slow orbit clockwise around the subject" and the model will actually orbit. But each model has its own prompt vocabulary, its own strongest moves, and its own quirks. Picking the wrong model for the shot type produces the same randomness problem; picking the right model requires running comparisons across all of them.

And then there is shot consistency across an edit. A two-minute branded film with twelve cuts needs every camera move to feel intentional and connected — not twelve random motions. Without a workflow that lets you plan the shot list and assign the right model per cut, edits land as a montage of disconnected moments rather than a real piece of cinematography.

Astorie lets you plan the shot list as nodes on a canvas, then assign the strongest model per cut. Wide establishing shot with a slow push? Sora 2 in a video node. Subject-centered orbit on the hero shot? Kling 3. Editorial lateral pan? Runway Gen-4. Photoreal crane shot? Google Veo. Each cut picks its own model, the canvas treats the whole shot list as one pipeline, and the sequence builder orders the cuts into the edit. Shot planning becomes visible — every node is a cut, every prompt is a camera direction, every model is a choice.

Fanout is the comparison tool. When you do not know which model owns a particular move — say, a complex push-in around a moving subject — duplicate the video node, swap the model, and run them in parallel. The same prompt against the same source image across Sora 2, Kling 3, and Runway Gen-4 tells you in one pass which engine handles your shot best. No tab switching, no test-pay-compare loop across separate APIs.

Sequence integration finishes the cinematography workflow. Order the cuts in a sequence builder with their planned moves; preview the edit; export through NLE export to Premiere, DaVinci, or Final Cut. The shot list lives inside the same canvas as the generations and the timeline, so the edit reads as cinematography rather than a montage of single-shot generations.