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Design a Text-to-Video Generation System

Build a production-scale text-to-video generation platform that creates coherent, high-quality videos from natural language descriptions with temporal consistency and controllable motion.

GenAI SystemsVideo GenerationTemporal Models
Q: What video generation capabilities and quality standards do we need to support?
A: Generate 10-60 second videos from text prompts, support 1080p resolution at 24-30 fps, maintain temporal consistency across frames, and achieve coherent motion with natural scene dynamics and character movements.
Engineering Implications: Video generation requires temporal diffusion models, motion consistency mechanisms, frame interpolation techniques, and massive computational resources. Quality standards drive model architecture choices, training data requirements, and post-processing pipelines for temporal smoothing.
Q: How do users interact with and control the video generation process?
A: Support natural language prompts, reference image/video uploads, style and motion controls, camera movement specifications, and iterative refinement with frame-level editing capabilities.
Engineering Implications: Control mechanisms require multi-modal conditioning, temporal parameter spaces, camera motion modeling, and real-time preview systems. Balance between simplicity (text-only prompts) and advanced control (timeline editing) for different user expertise levels.
Q: What scale and performance requirements must we meet?
A: Process 10K video generations daily, complete 10-second video in under 5 minutes, support concurrent generation for 1K users, and handle various video lengths from short clips to minute-long content.
Engineering Implications: Scale requires massive GPU clusters, intelligent queue management, progressive generation strategies, and distributed processing. Video generation is 100x more compute-intensive than image generation, demanding specialized infrastructure and optimization.
Q: What content safety and moderation challenges are unique to video?
A: Prevent violence, inappropriate content, deepfake abuse, and copyright infringement while ensuring temporal consistency in moderation decisions across video frames and maintaining creative freedom.
Engineering Implications: Video moderation requires frame-by-frame analysis, temporal pattern detection, motion-aware safety classifiers, and consistent policy enforcement across time. False positives in any frame can ruin entire videos, making precise safety systems critical.
Q: What are the business model and cost considerations for video generation?
A: Freemium: 5 videos/month, Pro: $50/month for unlimited short videos, Enterprise: $500/month with commercial rights and longer videos. Target 50% gross margin despite high computational costs.
Engineering Implications: Video generation costs are prohibitive compared to images, requiring innovative business models, tiered quality options, progressive pricing based on length/resolution, and aggressive optimization to maintain profitability while competing with traditional video production.
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🎯 Interview Practice Questions

Practice these follow-up questions to demonstrate deep understanding of text-to-video generation systems in interviews.

1. Temporal Consistency Architecture

"Design a video generation architecture that maintains object identity, scene consistency, and natural motion across a 30-second video. How do you handle camera movements, object interactions, and scene transitions while preventing temporal artifacts like flickering or identity drift?"

2. Massive Scale Infrastructure Design

"Your video generation system needs to handle 10K daily video requests, each requiring 50-100 GPU hours of compute. Design the infrastructure architecture, queue management, resource allocation, and cost optimization strategies while maintaining reasonable generation times."

3. Progressive Quality and Pricing Tiers

"Design a multi-tier service offering different video qualities and lengths at various price points. How do you architect the system to efficiently serve 480p 10-second clips, 1080p 30-second videos, and 4K 60-second premium content while optimizing resource utilization?"

4. Real-time Collaboration and Iteration

"Build a collaborative video editing platform where users can iteratively refine generated videos, make frame-level edits, adjust timing, and collaborate in real-time. Handle version control, conflict resolution, and seamless preview generation for complex video projects."

5. Advanced Motion and Camera Control

"Implement precise control over camera movements (pan, tilt, zoom), object motion trajectories, and scene dynamics. How do you design intuitive user interfaces for complex 3D motion while maintaining temporal consistency and natural-looking results?"

6. Multi-Modal Input Fusion

"Design a system that can generate videos from combinations of text descriptions, reference images, audio tracks, and existing video clips. How do you handle multi-modal conditioning, synchronization between modalities, and maintain coherent narrative flow?"