Privacy & your files

Your films, scripts and characters live only on your computer; here is exactly what leaves it, why, and what never does.

When you hand a studio your screenplay, you deserve a straight answer about who can see it. This page is that answer — no legalese, just what actually happens when pod makes your film.

Your films live on your computer — and only there

Every film pod makes for you is saved under the episodes folder on your own machine: the finished MP4, the script, the character sheets, the shot plans, every take. That is the only copy. Pod's makers never store your footage or your scripts, and they cannot see them.

That cuts both ways, so hear this part clearly:

So if you're three episodes into a telugu vertical series, the canon that keeps Meena's face identical from episode 1 to episode 30 is sitting in that folder on your desk — not on anyone's server. Treat it like the master reel it is.

Generation happens in the cloud — like any AI tool

Pod itself runs on your computer, but the actual image and video generation — the "shooting" — happens in the cloud. That's what your generation key pays for. When a shot renders, pod sends two things to the generation service:

• The prompts — the written descriptions of each shot the crew has prepared.
• The reference images — the character and location stills the shot needs to keep faces and places consistent.

The service uses those to make your images and clips, exactly the way any AI image or video tool works. If you've ever used an AI art tool in a browser, this is the same arrangement — the difference with pod is that everything around the generation (your script, your edits, your finished film, your series canon) stays home.

Managed studio accounts

If you're on a managed account — the kind where generation is included and you only entered a license key — your generation requests route through pod's service. That's simply how the studio gets billed: it's what makes "generation included, up to a monthly cap" possible without you ever touching a generation key. This is disclosed to you at onboarding, so nothing here should be a surprise; we're just repeating it in writing.

Everything else on this page still applies to managed accounts: your films, scripts and canon are saved only on your computer, and only prompts and reference images travel out to make your footage.

Optional prompt-sharing (own-key accounts)

If you use your own generation key, pod asks you once, at setup, whether you'd like to share your prompts to help improve pod. A few things worth knowing about how that question behaves:

• The default is no. If you skip past it or say nothing, nothing is shared.
• It's asked once — pod won't nag you about it again.
• You can turn it off at any time, even if you once said yes: set POD_SHARE_PROMPTS=0 and sharing stops.

Telemetry: opt-in, and deliberately boring

Pod has anonymous usage telemetry, and it is opt-in — off unless you say yes. Even when it's on, it's categorical only: broad counts of the kind "a film was produced", never the substance. Specifically, telemetry never includes:

• your film or episode titles,
• your prompts or scripts,
• your character names,
• your footage or any images (no faces, ever).

So if you're producing a thriller teaser you're keeping under wraps, opting into telemetry doesn't leak the title, the twist, or the lead's face. It can't — that information is never in what's sent.

The short version

One habit to build today: back up your episodes folder. Everything else on this page takes care of itself.

Related pages: Keys & setup · Series & continuity · Money & credits · FAQ