What an animatic is for
Directors cut animatics to answer one question before shooting: does the sequence work at this pace? A panel that looked fine on the wall can feel endless at eight seconds, and a cut that read as abrupt on paper can turn out to be the best moment in the scene. The only way to know is to watch it with time attached.
The timeline on this site is built around that question. Each card has a duration you set by hand or accept from the draft, and the running total tells you where the sequence lands against your target. Change a number, and the plan changes; nothing has to be re-drawn.
From cards to a moving animatic
Render a card at the Sketch tier and you get a quick, text-only take: no cast references, the cheapest price per second, enough to see whether a wide followed by a close feels right. Render the same card at Standard or High later and the references come in, the detail goes up, and the price follows. The card does not care which tier produced its take.
Because every take is its own file, you can mix tiers on one timeline: a Sketch take for an establishing shot nobody will linger on, a High take for the close-up that carries the scene. The join step conforms them all to one frame size.
Playing it back
Each rendered card plays its take in a small preview right on the timeline, so you can tap through the sequence card by card. When every card has a take, join the episode and the sequence becomes one continuous 9:16 file with a running time you can read off the meter.
If the pace is wrong, the fix is on the card: shorten a duration, split a long card into two, move a close-up earlier. Re-render only the cards you changed and join again.
Framing vocabulary
Animatics usually note framing in shorthand, and the cards do too. Shot size is one of wide, medium, close, over-the-shoulder or POV; camera move is static, push in, pan or handheld. The shorthand is not decoration. At render time it is written into the prompt as an instruction, so a card labelled close with a push renders as a close-up that pushes in.
Nothing promises that a take will match a drawn panel line for line. It will match the card's framing, timing, cast and line as closely as the render model manages, and that is usually enough to answer the question an animatic exists to answer.