I run a little pipeline that builds history-explainer videos end to end — script, narration, images, video — all automatically, all by myself.
Up until one day, the background was a single picture, slowly zooming. Two and a half minutes. Same picture the whole time. It got old, fast.
So I rebuilt it: switch to a different picture on every sentence. A 17-sentence script means 17 pictures. Easy to say. This is where I stepped on two very unglamorous rakes, back to back. Both of the "a job I assumed would finish instantly refuses to finish" variety.
A 16GB Mac can't paint 17 pictures at once
The images come from a local FLUX (an open image-generation model). Each one 1024x576, 4 steps, quantized to 3-bit. Run that on a 16GB Mac and a single image swallows the memory whole. So you must not run them in parallel. One at a time, and only after the previous process is fully dead. That's the rule.
