Effective AI video prompts describe a clear shot: what is visible, what happens, and how the camera sees it. Add style, lighting, mood, and timing when they help communicate the result. Then generate a clip, identify what missed the mark, and revise that part rather than piling on more instructions.
What should you put in an AI video prompt?
Think of a prompt as a shot description, not a list of keywords. A practical checklist is:
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- Framing and camera: close-up or wide shot, camera angle, and any camera movement.
- Subject: the person, animal, object, or group the viewer should notice.
- Action: what the subject does, described in observable terms.
- Environment: where the shot takes place and relevant background activity.
- Visual style: for example, documentary, animation, or a specific cinematic treatment.
- Lighting and mood: details that shape the atmosphere, such as soft dawn light or a tense, restrained mood.
There is no universal wording or required order. Runway’s text-to-video guide says clarity matters more than word count or rigid structure, and its current guidance is optimized for Gen-4.5. Adobe’s Firefly guide offers a more structured sequence as a useful starting point for beginners. These are recommendations for their respective tools, not a guarantee that every generator will interpret a prompt identically.
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Medium shot, eye-level camera slowly tracks beside a red bicycle as a rider crosses a rain-darkened city plaza at dusk. Reflections shimmer on the pavement; cool blue ambient light with warm shop windows; quiet documentary mood.
The prompt gives the model a subject, one main action, a setting, a camera treatment, and visual atmosphere. It is a starting description, not a promise of an exact result.
How do you describe action and camera movement?
Separate what the subject does from what the camera does. “A dog runs toward the camera” describes subject motion; “the camera pans left” describes camera motion. Add environmental motion, such as leaves blowing, when it matters to the shot. Runway’s Gen-4 guidance explicitly distinguishes subject, scene, and camera motion.
Keep the main action easy to follow. A useful rule of thumb is one plausible subject action and one camera move per shot. OpenAI’s archived Sora 2 guide expresses the same principle: “Each shot should have one clear camera move and one clear subject action.” If the scene needs several actions or changing camera positions, divide it into distinct shots or timed beats instead of making one prompt carry the whole sequence.
Use concrete verbs and visible outcomes. “The woman turns, picks up the cup, and walks away” gives a sequence of observable actions; “the woman feels uneasy” names an internal state that may not translate cleanly into visible motion. You can include the emotion as direction, but pair it with visible cues—such as a hesitant pause or a guarded glance—if those are important.
How should you prompt text-to-video?
In text-to-video, the prompt generally needs to establish both what the scene looks like and what moves. Start with the most important parts of the shot, then add details that clarify it. For instance, name the subject and location, state the action, and specify framing or camera motion before adding secondary atmosphere.
Runway’s text-to-video guide identifies visual and motion descriptions as essential, while cautioning against treating prompt length as a goal. Adobe likewise advises against overloading a prompt, since competing details can reduce coherence. If a result is confusing, adding more adjectives may not help; make the central action or camera direction clearer first.
How should you prompt image-to-video?
When a source image already establishes the subject, composition, colors, lighting, and style, use the text prompt mainly to describe what should move or change. Avoid re-describing details the image already makes clear unless they need to change. For multiple subjects, identify each by position or a simple label—for example, “the person on the left waves”—so actions are less ambiguous.
Capabilities vary by generator. Google’s Veo documentation describes reference-image workflows, first- and last-frame guidance for defining a clip’s intended opening and ending compositions, and clip extension with a continuation prompt. Use these controls only in products and versions that support them; they are product features, not universal prompting requirements.
How do you improve a prompt when the video is wrong?
Compare the result with the shot you intended and identify the specific mismatch. Change the corresponding part of the prompt, then generate again. This makes it easier to tell whether the change helped.
- The subject is unclear: name it more specifically, or distinguish it from other subjects by position.
- The action is weak or missing: replace a vague description with one visible action and a clear verb.
- The motion is confusing: simplify the action or remove competing movement instructions.
- The framing is wrong: state the intended shot size, angle, or camera move more directly.
- The style or atmosphere drifts: add or refine the relevant visual treatment, lighting, or mood cue.
- Unwanted details dominate: remove instructions that are not essential to the shot and try again.
Change one important component at a time where practical. If you alter the action, camera, setting, and style together, it becomes harder to tell which instruction affected the output. Prompting guides describe the process as direction and iteration, not as a way to guarantee a particular frame.
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Not every generation setting is a prompt-writing problem. The archived Sora 2 API guide describes model, output size, and clip duration as explicit API parameters, while prose describes content such as subject, motion, lighting, and style. Because that guide is marked archived and may be outdated, check the current product interface or API documentation for the controls available in your version.
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The same distinction applies across generators: use prompt text to communicate the shot, and use available settings for technical output choices. Names and availability of controls differ by product and can change over time.
How can you compare prompt variations fairly?
Keep the subject, action, and style stable while testing a single variable, such as framing or camera direction. Compare clips made with the same scene goal rather than changing several instructions at once. This helps you learn how a particular tool responds to your wording.
Official guidance from Runway, Adobe, Google, and OpenAI documents prompting approaches and individual features; it is not a controlled comparison of their generators. It does not establish a performance ranking across tools. The Sora 2 guide cited here is archived, so its model and API details should not be assumed to describe the current product.
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