What carries over, what gets regenerated

What the reference decides

Attach a reference video and Seedance 2.5 treats it as the plan to follow. The timing, the camera moves, the cut rhythm, and how hard the performance hits all carry across to the new clip. You are not writing a shot from a blank page. You are handing the model a finished blueprint and asking it to build the same thing again in your materials.

Length, framing, and the overall shape of the clip ride along the same way. That is why the cloner works best when you already like how the reference moves and you just want that same motion wearing your brand and your product.

What the model draws fresh

Nothing from the source gets pasted through. The output is a brand-new render, not an edit of the original footage. So the motion and rhythm match the reference, but the surfaces, the lighting, and the subject are generated from scratch out of your product, your style, and your script.

That is the clean line between Video Cloner and a frame-accurate editor. If your real job is to trim, cut, or composite the actual original pixels, reach for the video editor instead. If your job is to rebuild the same energy and pacing around your own product, that is this tool.

When the motion is dropped

There is one case where motion is not followed: a source clip refused by moderation falls back to a styled first frame, and that path cannot track the original's movement. Every other time, an attached reference video is read as real motion, never as a lone still.