A good AI video prompt specifies six things: subject, action, camera, lighting, style, and audio. Most bad prompts specify one. That is the entire difference, and it explains most of the gap between the outputs people see in demos and the outputs they get themselves.
The Six-Slot Structure
Subject. Who or what is in frame, described concretely.
Action. What changes across the duration of the clip. Without this, a video prompt often collapses into a still image that jitters.
Camera. Static, slow push in, handheld follow, orbit, crane down. Video models have absorbed a real vocabulary of camera movement.
Lighting. One of the highest-leverage clauses in any generative prompt. Change nothing else and the output transforms.
Style. Documentary, anamorphic, 35mm grain, commercial product photography. This sets the visual register.
Audio. Relevant on models that generate sound natively. Specify ambience, effects, and dialogue separately.
A prompt using all six
A woman in her fifties, grey hair pulled back, heavy wool coat, walks slowly along a wet stone harbour wall as gulls scatter ahead of her. Camera tracks alongside at walking pace, slight handheld float. Overcast late afternoon light, cool and diffuse, no hard shadows. Documentary style, 35mm, subtle grain. Audio: wind, distant gull cries, footsteps on wet stone.
Model-Specific Behaviour
Veo 3.1 responds unusually well to cinematographic and audio language, because it models both explicitly. Lens language, lighting direction, and specific audio cues all land.
Kling 3.0 rewards precise motion and camera description, and it is the model to reach for when the prompt involves multiple speaking characters because of its phoneme-level lip sync.
Seedance 2.0 inverts the whole exercise. When you supply reference images, video, and audio, you are describing less and pointing more. The prompt becomes a set of instructions about what to do with the references rather than a description of an invented scene.
Grok Imagine Video leans toward creative and emotionally driven visuals rather than strict photorealism, which makes it good for atmosphere and weaker for exact product reproduction.
The Four Failures, and Their Fixes
The still that jitters. No action specified. Add a verb that describes change across time.
Drift between clips. The face, product, or setting changes between generations. Switch to image-to-video or reference-driven generation.
Text in the frame is garbage. Every model still struggles with this. Composite it afterwards.
Everything looks like stock video. The prompt specified subject only, so the model filled the other slots with statistical averages.
Where AI Enhance Fits
Writing six-slot prompts correctly every time is a skill, and it is also friction. SmophyAI's AI Enhance takes a plain-language brief and rewrites it into the expanded structure video models respond to, filling the slots you did not think to fill.
Two rules matter here. Give it more than a fragment, because expanding three words produces a generic prompt rather than yours. And turn it off for final renders where you have already dialled the prompt in by hand, because at that point rewriting introduces variance you do not want.
One Prompt, Several Models
The fastest way to learn what any model actually does is to run one carefully written prompt through several of them and compare the differences. Where outputs converge, the prompt was unambiguous. Where they diverge, your prompt left a decision to the model.
With multiple video models on one token balance, that comparison is cheap enough to do routinely instead of treating it as a one-off experiment.
FAQ
What makes a good AI video prompt?
A good prompt specifies six elements: subject, action, camera movement, lighting, visual style, and audio. Prompts that specify only the subject usually produce generic output because the model fills the remaining slots with training-data averages.
Why does my AI video look like a still image?
The prompt did not specify an action. Video prompts need a verb describing what changes across the clip's duration. Without it, models often produce a near-static frame with minor motion artefacts.
Why do faces change between my AI video clips?
Text-to-video reinvents the subject on every generation. To maintain consistency, use image-to-video with a fixed first frame or a reference-driven model like Seedance 2.0 that composites from supplied reference material.
Can AI video models render readable text?
Not reliably. Legible brand names, signs, and labels inside a moving frame remain difficult for every major model in this category. Composite critical text in post-production.
Should I use an AI prompt enhancer?
For exploration and drafting, yes, because it fills prompt slots you would otherwise leave empty. For final renders of a prompt you have already refined by hand, turn it off to avoid introducing unnecessary variance.
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