Marey by Moonvalley | An Honest AI Video Generator Review

Sep 29

Note: This Review is Non-Biased and Not Affiliated with Moonvalley in Any Way.

In this article, we will give you an in-depth breakdown of Moonvalley’s AI Video Generator, Marey.

Moonvalley advertises Marey as a cinematic AI video generator with “Studio-grade quality, Frame-perfect control, and Trained on licensed data”. Here are the specs from Marey:

• Resolution: up to 1080p (with upscaling options).
• Frame rate: 24fps.
• Clip length: up to 10s generations, extendable.
• Dataset claim: copyright-cleared.
•Advanced features such as motion transfer, trajectory control, and more.

Marey is targeting filmmakers who want to use their work professionally. Unlike their competitors, who are trained on questionable datasets, Marey guarantees that its outputs are legally safe to use.

That position has given them a “safety first” reputation, even if Moonvalley would rather you focus on their cinematic polish and granular shot control. But does bulletproof legal protection come with enough technical juice to justify adoption?

We ran Marey through 18 benchmark tests to answer this question. Below, we’ll take a deep dive into how the model handled everything from single-subject portraits to complex crowd choreography.

Marey by Moonvalley - Benchmark Score (3.2/10)

In our Curious Refuge Labs™ review, Marey was scored on five categories:

Prompt Adherence: 3.1/10
Temporal Consistency: 2.7/10
Visual Fidelity: 4.1/10
Motion Quality: 3.4/10
Style & Cinematic Realism: 2.6/10

Total Curious Refuge Labs™ Score: 3.2/10

As is clear from the ratings, Marey is less of a ready-to-go tool for your workflow and more of a promise of something to come.

Marey by Moonvalley | AI Video Expert Review

Below is a detailed review of how Marey performs against the categories listed above.

Prompt Adherence: 3.1/10 (Poor)

Marey scored badly in prompt adherence. It isn’t that Marey doesn’t follow prompts; it’s that adherence is streaky and unpredictable.

Take “Woman hailing a cab” adherence here easily earns an eight. The only place we see hard divergence is with her hands, no surprise there.

The only line where the prompt drifts hard is: “She is holding a takeaway coffee cup and a black clipboard. The video starts with her looking down, then she looks up, raises her arm confidently to hail a taxi…”

The issue is that we’re asking Marey to render a character that is simultaneously juggling a coffee cup, a clipboard, and hailing a cab, all while smiling.

This is too subtle or nuanced for Marey, and the final product abandons this line in its entirety.

Seedance Pro 1.0

Marey

Veo 3

This pattern repeats almost exactly in “Woman Sitting”. We see adherence really break down: “…running her hand through her hair and looking at the camera…” Again, no surprise, an issue with hands.

Though adherence isn’t perfect for these elements, lighting, atmosphere, and tone are strongly rendered here.

Marey’s prompt adherence is poor, but it’s not as bad as its score would suggest; it’s just that when it works, it really works. And when it breaks, it breaks badly.

That’s what’s causing such a low score: adherence varies from solid to dismal.

Temporal Consistency: 2.7/10 (Poor)

There is no getting around it, Marey has poor temporal consistency, and it feels like one of the biggest roadblocks holding them back. So many of these shots flirt with usability but break down at the last second.

Once again, we saw the highest score with our simplest prompt, “Woman hailing a cab.” Otherwise, props disappear, hands warp, and blur. Characters in crowd shots blend together into a single blob; it’s largely a mess.

Very slow aerials had some cohesion, but not enough to be usable. A cinematic close-up held up briefly, but you couldn’t call it usable.

In reality, there wasn’t a single shot that was free of consistency issues. As it stands, these technical issues defined our experience with Marey more than any of its considerable strengths.

Visual Fidelity: 4.1/10 (Fair)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, visual fidelity followed a familiar Marey pattern.

In the beginning, we are briefly impressed, and then reality hits, and the shot collapses. There’s definitely sharpness to some images. And the product shots showed real promise. But jitter is constant, even a given with Marey.

Camera motion, whip pans, and drone orbits expose heavy flicker. Extremely slow aerial shots were the lone exception from jittering and flicker, but they had to be dead slow to accomplish this.

Skin tones ranged from plastic to almost passable, but largely, the results only last a couple of seconds before disintegrating.

Textures were flat but again, occasionally impressed, such as with the skin tones and textures in “Two People Talking.”

Marey’s own marketing material calls their visual fidelity “exceptional”, but the shots just don’t deliver the detail and nuance promised.

Motion Quality: 3.4/10 (Poor)

This is one of Marey’s weakest categories, only slightly ahead of temporal consistency. Marey shows sporadic flashes of fluid motion (with simple prompts), but most outputs collapse when asked to handle anything dynamic.

In the shadowboxing shot above, the woman’s boxing technique looks wonky and a bit uncanny. Not surprisingly, moving hands or expressive gestures almost universally failed.

One place motion felt consistently stronger was in 2D animated shots, where the simplified style masked many of Marey’s weaknesses. Even in the 2D example above, the temporal consistency and visual fidelity are very poor quality.

Motion quality in Marey depends on: simple prompts with little dynamic action, and only one or two characters did best, but the moment you add speed, crowding, or gesture, it breaks.

Style & Cinematic Realism: 2.6/10 (Poor)

It’s no surprise that this is Marey’s weakest category. Its considerable flaws snowball, and the end result is a lack of realism and a generic cinematic style.

At first glance, Marey sure seems to speak cinema. Shallow focus, dramatic lighting, slow pans. The setups look very cinematic. That is, until the actor moves, the camera shifts, or the scene goes on longer than a few seconds.

Take a look at some of the stronger shots. The hand in water has glimmers of cinematic realism. Or once again, our simplest prompt, “Woman hailing a cab,” worked.

Her outfit, the shallow focus, the rain-soaked streets, and the well-rendered cityscape all work together flawlessly.

If not for her Joker grin and plastic skin, the whole thing would look and feel downright cinematic. But most other tests show just how “brittle” Marey’s cinematic facade really is.

Pretty much any over-the-shoulder conversation, the bread-and-butter of narrative drama, collapsed into stiff, mannequin-like gestures that robbed the scene of any authenticity.

The Crowd eruption in the bar turned into a chaotic smear of color, with no discernible faces or bodies. It is possible to get quality cinematic shots from Marey.

In the end, Marey can stage a convincing image, but it can’t sustain a cinematic moment.

The first seconds may sparkle, but the illusion unravels the instant nuance, duration, or motion enters the frame.

A handful of prompts prove that Marey can brush up against realism. But what you get is less cinema and more imitation.

Do We Recommend Marey for AI Video Artists?

The simple answer is: No. Not if you are looking for cinematic realism or production-ready output. But as always, there’s a caveat.

Judging Marey only by its current outputs misses the bigger picture. When you factor in Moonvalley’s whole ecosystem, their focus on licensed data, safety-first positioning, and the suite of related creative tools they’re building, Marey starts to make more sense.

As part of a larger toolkit, it’s something we’d recommend keeping on your radar, even if the video generator alone doesn’t yet justify adoption.

Is Marey Copyright Cleared?

Yes. Moonvalley markets Marey as “commercially safe” and “fully licensed.” Marey’s own documentation specifically states: “legal assurance for commercial use”. This makes it a natural fit for risk-averse users and for studios already facing or worried about litigation.

This is the big draw of this AI Video generator. Marey will hopefully become better in its generations with new models and updates, raising the potential for being used in real-world Hollywood-level productions.

How Does Marey Stack Up Against Other AI Video Tools?

In our opinion, we feel like Marey falls close to the bottom of the list when put against other AI video tools. Like we said previously, Marey seems to be a foreshadowing of what using AI tools in professional workflows, where the copyright clearance is of utmost importance, but at the moment, this tool falls short.