Nano Banana 2 vs Nano Banana Pro: which should you use for AI character sheet generation?

For character sheet generation in a film pipeline, use Nano Banana Pro — it has stronger prompt adherence and holds multi-angle character fidelity better than Nano Banana 2. Use Nano Banana 2 for high-volume variant generation and fast iteration before you lock. Both run inside the invideo agent, which routes per shot.

Default to Nano Banana Pro at the character-sheet locking stage. It's built on Gemini 3 Pro reasoning and delivers tighter prompt fidelity on complex multi-angle compositions — front, side, back, face closeup, mid-angle closeup — which is what you need when one character has to stay the same person across 50+ shots. Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash) runs roughly 2-3x faster at about half the per-image cost (~$0.08 vs ~$0.13), so use it earlier in the pipeline when you're exploring options or generating high-volume variants you don't need to anchor to.

The trade-off worth knowing: Pro's precision can tip into a stock-photo aesthetic on portraits. That's why a frames-first AI film pipeline doesn't use Pro for everything — Recraft V4 handles photoreal face portraits (it renders skin imperfections like pores, lines, stubble), Nano Banana Pro builds the multi-angle character sheet from those portraits at 4K, and Seedance 2.0 takes the locked sheet into video. The invideo agent holds all three models and routes per asset, so you don't pick a platform per model.

Generate four options per sheet and lock before any video. Ask the invideo agent for four variations of each character sheet and environment reference, pick one, and lock it into context. Locking character sheets and environment references before any video generation is the single step that prevents consistency problems across the rest of the film.

Run a parallel model casting comparison first. Tell a casting sub-agent to run the same character prompt on Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro simultaneously, then choose the aesthetic that fits the film. This is how one production picked Pro on evidence rather than as a default — "Nano Banana Pro, it has insane prompt adherence. Something about these images felt extremely stock photo-y to me," the director noted, which is exactly why the comparison step matters.

Include close-ups, not just wide angles. Character sheets must include face and mid-angle closeups so small details — scars, accessories, a necklace — carry across models. Remove handheld props before generating the multi-angle turnaround so the agent doesn't bake an object into every angle.

Use a separate sheet per beat when the character evolves. If a character gains a trinket, changes costume, or shifts through a continuous take, generate a distinct sheet for each beat rather than relying on one master sheet. Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it bluntly: "the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly, right? Or else it'll kind of hallucinate and imagine something that's under the cap."

Fix continuity errors at the sheet, not the shot. When a shot breaks consistency, ask the invideo agent to inspect the character sheet for the source error. It identifies the exact panel, corrects it, stores the updated sheet in context, and every subsequent shot inherits the fix — surgical edits, not slot-machine re-rolls.

Production proof: a 70-second short film used this exact split — 11 image generations total covering headshots and head-to-toe references for 4 characters and 1 prop, with 4 options generated per asset before locking. Total cost was $750 (3,000 credits) over 2 production days, with character consistency held across every scene — no LoRA, no fine-tuning. A separate Arcane-style animated episode locked each character in ~5 generations at roughly $9.78 per character. Across documented productions, image-asset locking ran a small fraction of total spend ($750–$5,000 all-in for shorts of 70 seconds to several minutes), which is why over-generating four options per sheet is a budget line, not waste.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

Nano Banana Pro, it has insane prompt adherence. Something about these images felt extremely stock photo-y to me.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director