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Conal Mullan fd24349fe1 REMOVE: EchoMimicV3 — drift made it unusable, SoulX is the default (#81)
EchoMimicV3 was added earlier in this same unreleased cycle and never reached a
tagged release, so this removes it rather than deprecating it — no public API
changes.

Identity drift is why. On a controlled A/B (same photo, same 80s audio, same
544x736) it fell to 50% of frame-zero sharpness by 70s, glasses dissolving
around 55s and no recognisable face by 67s, where SoulX-FlashHead held 97%. The
failure is absorbing rather than gradual — each segment re-anchors on the
previous segment's output, so one bad segment poisons everything after it — and
colour correction recovers none of it because the damage is structural. That
implied a ~30s render ceiling which shaped the surrounding design.

The one capability SoulX lacks is text-prompt and CFG steering, and our own
docs already recorded from testing that the prompt is close to inert. Everything
else EchoMimicV3 offered, SoulX matches or beats: aspect preservation, motion
quality, ~3.7x cheaper, ~3-6x faster. The genuine loss is gesture and
upper-body motion, which nothing in the toolkit currently uses.

Also in this commit:
- Talking head docs, registry entries (tools and modal endpoints), cloud_gpu
  dispatch, modal-setup, NarratorPiP's comment and both env files repointed to
  soulx. cloud_gpu also gains a GPU tier for it, which echomimic3 never had --
  its jobs silently reported no cost estimate.
- The Unreleased Kiro changelog entry is dropped; it shipped in v0.19.0 and was
  flagged in-file for removal when this section was cut.

Findings worth keeping outlived the tool and moved into docs/soulx.md: the
warning against scoring talking heads with similarity metrics (two have now
misled — one ranked highest a variant with a visible eye defect, the other
plateaued straight through a total collapse), the volume-weights rationale, and
the image guidelines.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-31 11:41:35 +01:00
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