AI video and image glossary
Plain definitions of the terms that appear across Higgsfield and every other AI video and image tool — generation modes, control, quality and commercial words.
Terms used throughout this wiki and across the category, in plain language.
Generation
Text-to-image (T2I) — producing an image from a written prompt alone.
Text-to-video (T2V) — producing a clip from a written prompt alone. The model invents every frame.
Image-to-video (I2V) — animating a supplied still. The starting frame is fixed, so you control the look and only ask for motion.
Image-to-image (I2I) — producing a new image anchored to one you supply, rather than from description alone.
First frame / last frame — supplying the opening and closing images of a clip so the model interpolates between them.
Control and consistency
Identity preservation — keeping a specific person recognisably themselves through a generation or an edit. Not achievable by describing them; it requires a reference image and a mode built for it.
Reference image — an image supplied to anchor subject, style or composition.
Drift — the gradual change of a subject's appearance over a clip, or across a series. The main reason long generations are unreliable.
Temporal coherence — whether a video stays consistent frame to frame. Its absence shows as flicker or shimmer.
Multi-shot — generating several distinct camera setups that hold together as one scene.
Seed — the number initialising a generation. The same seed with the same prompt and settings reproduces the same output.
Quality and processing
Upscaling — increasing output resolution after generation, adding plausible detail rather than recovering real detail.
Artefact — a visible defect introduced by generation: warped hands, garbled text, smeared edges.
Lip sync — matching mouth movement to speech. Done natively by models that generate audio; bolted on afterwards otherwise, which is the most common tell in AI video.
Inpainting — regenerating a selected region while leaving the rest untouched.
Outpainting — extending an image beyond its original borders.
Commercial
Credit — the unit consumed by a generation. Cost per run varies by model, media type, duration and resolution.
Watermark — an identifying mark applied to output, common on free tiers.
UGC — user-generated content, or in advertising, content styled to look like it.
Aspect ratio — frame proportions. 9:16 vertical for short-form social, 16:9 horizontal for landscape, 1:1 square.
Common questions
What is the difference between text-to-video and image-to-video?
Text-to-video invents every frame from a prompt. Image-to-video starts from a still you supply, so the look is already settled and you are only asking for motion — far more controllable.
What does identity preservation mean?
Keeping a specific person recognisably themselves through a generation. Describing someone in a prompt does not do it; it needs a reference image and a mode designed for it.