Generated video in American film and television is governed less by what the tools can do than by what production agreements permit. Those terms were bargained collectively.
Digital replicas require consent and notice
Agreements covering performers address the creation and use of digital replicas of a person. The general principle is that a performer must consent, and the consent must describe the intended use.
Consent obtained for one production does not automatically extend to another. A replica made for a specific scene cannot simply be reused in a later project.
Producers therefore track replica assets as licensed items with terms attached. That record keeping is now part of standard production administration.
Notice requirements change the workflow
Where a production intends to use synthetic performance, the requirement to give notice pushes the decision earlier. It becomes a pre-production question rather than a post-production convenience.
This has a practical effect on which uses survive. Replacing a scheduled shooting day is planned and disclosed, while patching a problem in the edit is exactly the use that runs into difficulty.
The result is that generated performance appears mostly in situations that were designed for it from the start.
Background performance was the contested case
Crowd and background work is the most economically exposed, because it is high volume and individually low paid. It is also the easiest to synthesize convincingly.
Bargaining focused there for that reason, and the terms reached shape whether a production can generate a crowd or must hire one.
Writing credit rules run in parallel
Agreements covering writers address whether generated material can be treated as source material and how credit and compensation are determined when a writer revises it.
Credit determines residual payments, so this is a financial question rather than a symbolic one. Productions manage it by documenting authorship at each stage.
The documentation burden is itself a deterrent, since a project that cannot cleanly establish who wrote what creates a credit dispute later.
Non-union production is where the change is visible
Commercials, corporate video, social content and much unscripted work fall outside these agreements. Adoption there has been far less constrained.
Comparing the two sectors gives a reasonably clean picture of what the agreements are actually holding back, since the tools available are identical.
That contrast is the most reliable way to see how much of current practice reflects capability and how much reflects negotiated terms.