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ADR 0005: SeedVR2 Video Quality Proof Requires Five-Second Reader-First Clips

Status: Accepted.

Context

Recent SeedVR2 video work produced several misleading proof shapes:

  • sub-second clips could show that a command ran, but they did not reliably expose cadence errors, time-mixing, or motion distortion;
  • sampled contact sheets and heuristic scores were useful review aids, but they were not enough to let a reader judge whether movement stayed coherent;
  • terse labels such as wavelet, lab, and off were implementation names, not reader-first explanations.

For video restoration quality, the reader has to see motion. If the proof is shorter than a few seconds, it is too easy to miss the exact failure modes that matter most: skipped-motion feel, time dilation, repeated cadence artifacts, or frame-to-frame distortion.

Decision

For SeedVR2 public video quality claims, MLX-Gen uses a reader-first minimum proof duration of five contiguous seconds.

The rule is:

  • any public quality claim about a SeedVR2 video profile, checkpoint, or comparison must use at least five seconds of contiguous source video at the original FPS;
  • shorter clips are allowed only for narrow internal diagnostics and must not be presented as the primary quality proof;
  • full-length video runs may still be kept as host-safety or long-run stability evidence, but they are secondary to the five-second reader-first proof when judging visible quality.

Required public proof artifacts for SeedVR2 video quality claims are:

  • restored MP4 files for the compared candidates;
  • one comparison MP4 when more than one candidate is being compared;
  • one contiguous motion-strip sheet;
  • at least one detail crop sheet focused on moving subjects or other distortion-prone regions;
  • a readable validation report that explains what the labels mean, what profiles were rejected, and what conclusion the reader should draw.

Reader-facing labels must be intelligible. Raw implementation tokens may appear in parentheses, but the visible description must explain the behavior in plain language.

Consequences

Positive

  • Readers can judge motion quality directly instead of inferring from a sub-second clip or a single score.
  • Public docs distinguish between route proof, long-run stress proof, and visible quality proof.
  • SeedVR2 validation reports become easier to audit and harder to overclaim.

Negative

  • Public validation takes longer to produce than a tiny smoke clip.
  • Some earlier proof artifacts become internal audit evidence instead of public-quality evidence.

Neutral

  • Tiny clips and sampled metrics still remain useful for fast local debugging.
  • Long-run full-video runs remain valuable for memory, host-safety, and output-integrity checks.

Enforcement

  • Docs, backlog completion notes, and release evidence must not present sub-second SeedVR2 clips as the primary proof of video quality.
  • New SeedVR2 comparison claims must link the exact five-second proof bundle and readable report.
  • Review should reject terse labels when a reader cannot understand what a mode or profile does without reading code.
  • Comparative family claims must be grounded in direct visual proof, not heuristic ranking alone.

Validation

Compliance is validated by:

  • preserved five-second proof MP4s and comparison MP4s;
  • preserved motion-strip and detail-crop review sheets;
  • a checked-in validation report with human-readable labels and conclusions;
  • direct visual review of the preserved proof artifacts.