FASTER.md, or: how to make it less awesome but still better than nothing

The Motion Lab defaults are tuned for quality. Every dial below trades some of that quality for wall-clock time, in descending order of how much time it buys. Numbers come from measured runs on the example scenes; your content will move them, the ordering should hold. The plan report prices most of these before you spend a second of GPU: queue the windowed graph with window: 0, read the report, then decide.

Where the time actually goes

A de-rope render is pass 1 (generate) plus pass 2 (regenerate the dilated timeline at higher effective resolution). Pass 2 dominates, and its cost is roughly quadratic in token count: tokens = frames x pixels. So the dials that remove frames or pixels beat the dials that make steps cheaper.

The dials, best value first

dial	where	default	cheaper setting	what you give up
`dilation` / `d_max`	H3 Time Smear / H3 Jerk Oracle	4	3 or 2	the slow-motion budget on bursts; 2 still beats no de-rope by a wide margin
`q`	H3 Jerk Oracle	0.75	0.85	fewer frames count as bursts, so borderline motion stays baseline
`expand_to_end`	H3 Time Smear	on in some graphs	off	the span after the last burst stays baseline; fine when the tail is calm
`inject`	H3 Inject Schedule	0.48	keep 0.48	it is already the cheap setting: only the steps below the inject point run. 0.7 is the deeper, slower variant
pass 2 resolution	the second ResolutionSelector	1.5 MP	1.0 MP	the upscale half of upscale-de-rope; tokens scale with pixels
`coverage`	H3 Window Plan	full clip	burst only	on NON-upscale graphs only: calm spans keep their baseline render. On upscale graphs leave it on full clip or calm spans stay low-res
`kv_store`	H3 Streamed Blocks	kvi8r	kvi8s	needs the sageattention package; measured 219 vs 318 s/step at long context, judged side by side as a keeper
`handle_frames`	H3 Window Plan	12	8	less duplicated context at window seams; the edge pins carry more of the tracking load
`steps` (pass 1)	BasicScheduler	12 (fast flow)	12	going below 12 shows; save elsewhere first

What not to touch

The window edge pins (MiniMax H3 Add Guide at the first and last frame). They cost nothing measurable and they are what holds the regenerated windows on the baseline's motion and look.
The audio seed (H3 Audio Smear into H3 V2V Init). Also near-free, and pass 2's foley tracks the original performance because of it.
max_dilated_frames does not buy total time. Smaller windows lower the PEAK cost so a smaller card can run at all; the total goes slightly up from duplicated handles.

A worked example

The rolling-window example scene (107 frames, 4.5 s) plans 243 dilated frames at the defaults: 2.27x the frames and 4.0x the time per step of a plain pass. Dropping d_max to 3 and q to 0.85 with expand_to_end off re-plans the same clip in the low 100s of dilated frames; the burst keeps its slow-motion budget and the calm frames stop paying for it. Queue with window: 0 and the report will show you the exact count for your clip before you commit.