AI · 2026 · Built alone, March 2026
Local SVD
I wanted image-to-video on a 16 GB M2 Pro without renting someone else's GPU.
The recipes online assumed a richer laptop than mine
March 2026 I had a still I liked and no interest in uploading it to a website that would charge me per second. Diffusers examples kept assuming 24 GB and a smile. My M2 Pro has 16. Conv3D on MPS likes to sulk. I wanted a boring, conservative path: keep the weights on an external SSD, offload the UNet and VAE when they are idle, cap frames, write a short MP4, and leave a JSON sidecar so I can do it again.
No ComfyUI. No Docker theatre. YAML config, imageio-ffmpeg, a safe mode that is on unless I am feeling lucky. It is the least glamorous repo in this list and the one that taught me the most about making a model fit the metal I actually own.
When the first clip survived
The first time the bar reached the end without the fans screaming in a new key, I sat there like I had stolen something. A lake turned into a few seconds of motion. The log told me seed, steps, and what the machine believed it was doing. That file is why this sits next to VideoForge2. Sometimes the cloud is the wrong tool. Sometimes you just need a clip and a machine that stays yours.