Live Video Is No Longer Static. Decart Lucy 2.5 Edits It While It Streams.
Decart just dropped Lucy 2.5, and it does something no other AI video model has pulled off convincingly: it edits live video at 30 frames per second with near-zero latency. Not pre-rendered. Not after-the-fact. Live, in the stream, while the camera is still rolling.
What does that actually mean? You can swap a character in a live video feed, change the entire environment from a sunny street to a neon cyberpunk scene, add fire or water effects that behave physically, remove objects and have the background fill in naturally, and restyle the whole thing with a text prompt. All while the video is still streaming.
What Lucy 2.5 Actually Does
The model runs at 1080p resolution and 30 FPS with sub-40 millisecond latency. That is fast enough to feel instant. The big upgrades from the previous version:
Physically-aware VFX. Fire, water, sand, slime, smoke. These effects now interact with the environment around them. Sand settles. Water flows. Fire illuminates. This is not a filter slapped on top. The model understands physics well enough to make elements sit inside the scene rather than float above it.
Character and object swaps that stick. Previous versions of real-time AI video struggled with temporal consistency. Swap a jacket on someone and by frame 300 it has drifted into something else. Lucy 2.5 introduces what Decart calls Self-Anchoring. The model takes a snapshot of its own output as a reference point, then trains on that self-anchored data. The result: a costume change made in second one is still there in minute five. Identity survives motion. A person can leave the frame, turn around, and come back still wearing the edit.
Object removal with background reconstruction. Erase something from the scene and the model fills in what was behind it, consistently, across time. Not a blur. Not a smear. Actual geometry that holds up over a continuous stream.
Global style transforms. Change the entire aesthetic of a scene while preserving the structure, geometry, and identity of the subjects. A daytime cityscape becomes a rain-soaked neon street. A bright living room turns into a moody cinema interior. The underlying video keeps its shape. The style changes completely.
Coarse-to-fine prompting. You can give a simple instruction like “add a hat” or drill into precision with “add a wide-brimmed black felt hat, tilted slightly forward, casting shadow over the eyes.” The model handles both levels.
What This Unlocks for Creators and Brands
The creative implications are significant. Here is where this gets real:
Live product placement that adapts to the viewer. A livestream can now show different products to different audiences. One viewer in Tokyo sees a specific phone model on the desk. Another in Sydney sees a different brand. Same stream. Different products. Swapped in real time.
Virtual try-on that moves with you. Point a camera at yourself and Lucy 2.5 can swap in a jacket, change the colour, adjust the lighting to match the environment. The try-on follows your motion. It handles shadows. It adjusts when you turn. This is not a static overlay on a photo. It is a live, physically consistent transformation.
Live streaming with real-time VFX. Streamers can add explosions, weather effects, set changes, and character overlays that respond to the scene. Audiences could trigger effects through chat commands. The creative possibilities for live content are wide open.
Ad localisation at scale. One video. Infinite regional versions. Swap the product on the table, change the language on the sign, restyle the environment to match local aesthetics. All generated live, no post-production needed.
How to Use It
Lucy 2.5 is available through the Decart API. You connect a video stream, send edit instructions via text prompt or reference image, and receive the edited stream back. The model supports both real-time and batch processing modes.
The real-time mode (called Lucy Edit Live) processes each frame as it arrives. The batch mode (Lucy Edit) handles pre-recorded video with the same editing capabilities but without the latency constraint.
Decart also offers Lucy Virtual Try-On for e-commerce applications, Lucy Restyle for full video restyling, and Lucy Image for image-to-image transformation. All run on the same underlying model with task-specific fine-tuning.
For developers: the SDK is open source on GitHub with full documentation. You can integrate it with a few API calls. The model supports both text prompts and reference images as edit instructions, and the coarse-to-fine prompting system means you can start simple and refine from there.
What to Watch For
Real-time AI video editing at this quality is new territory. A few things to keep in mind:
The self-anchoring technique that keeps edits stable is a genuine technical advance. If it holds up across diverse real-world conditions (different skin tones, complex environments, rapid motion), it solves the single biggest problem with AI video editing: drift.
The VFX engine treating effects as physical objects within the scene rather than composited overlays is the right approach. Watch whether the model handles edge cases like reflections of fire on wet surfaces or sand blowing in wind. Those details will separate a demo from a production tool.
The commercial model matters too. Decart is targeting brands, agencies, and platforms with API pricing. Whether independent creators can afford it at scale will determine whether this stays a enterprise tool or becomes the default for live video everywhere.
And then there is the bigger question. When anyone can edit reality in a live video stream, the line between what is real and what is generated disappears completely. That is exciting for creators. It is complicated for everyone else. The same tech that lets a brand swap products into a livestream can also put words in someone’s mouth or a product in their hand that was never there.
For now, the creative potential is unmistakable. Live video has always been the hardest medium to edit. Decart Lucy 2.5 just made it editable in real time. What you do with that is up to you.
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