How to Make a Video From Text With AI

Step 1: Decide what kind of video you are making

Start with the finished video, not the tool. A product clip for an ad, a narrated explainer, a vertical short and a piece of atmospheric B-roll all ask different things of a generator. Decide the format first: horizontal 16:9 for YouTube and websites, vertical 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Most generators ask you to pick the aspect ratio before you generate, and changing it afterwards usually means generating again.

Also decide how much of the video is generated footage. If a person needs to talk to the camera for two minutes, a generator is the wrong starting point — that is avatar territory, covered in our comparison of AI avatar vs text-to-video. If the video is scenes, moods and movement with a voiceover on top, text-to-video is exactly right, and the text-to-video category is where the candidate tools live.

Step 2: Pick a generator — and test it free first

You do not need to pay to learn this workflow. Several generators in our directory have genuine free plans you can practise on: Runway offers a free plan with starter credits, Kling AI gives free credits to test with, and Pika has a free plan whose output carries no watermark on any plan, according to its listing. Our roundup of the best free AI video generators compares what each free plan actually allows before you sign up.

Judge a generator on the footage, not the marketing. Run the same two or three prompts through two different tools and compare motion quality, how well each follows the prompt, and how often a generation is unusable. That last number matters more than the demo reel, because every failed generation still spends your credits — a point that decides your real costs later.

Step 3: Write a prompt the model can film

A good prompt describes one scene a camera could shoot: a subject, one clear action, a setting, a camera movement and the light or style. “A red delivery van drives along a wet coastal road at dawn, camera tracking from the side, soft golden light” gives the model something filmable. “An amazing epic video about transport” gives it almost nothing, and vague prompts produce vague footage.

Keep one action per clip. Asking for a character to enter a room, sit down, open a laptop and start typing in a single generation usually ends with none of it done well. Split the story into shots the way a film crew would, one prompt per shot. Our dedicated guide on how to write a good text-to-video prompt goes through the formula with examples.

• Subject: who or what is in the frame, described concretely
• Action: one verb-led movement the subject performs
• Setting: where and when the scene happens
• Camera: static, tracking, drone shot, close-up — pick one
• Light and style: dawn, neon, documentary, cinematic, cartoon

Step 4: Generate, review and regenerate

Generate your first clip and watch it all the way through, including the last second — generations often start well and drift at the end. Note what is wrong in one sentence: wrong camera movement, warped hands, the subject changes appearance, the action never happens. Then change one thing in the prompt and generate again. Changing everything at once teaches you nothing about what fixed it.

Expect to spend credits on shots you throw away. As our category pages put it, rejected generations usually still burn credits, so your usable footage always costs more than the sticker maths suggests. This is normal, not a sign you picked the wrong tool — budget for it, and read AI video credits explained before you choose a paid plan size.

Step 5: Turn clips into a finished video

Clips become a video in an editor. Arrange the shots in story order, trim the weak first and last frames, then add the layers a generator does not give you: a voiceover or on-screen text, captions, and music or sound. Tools in the AI video editor category are built for this assembly work, and CapCut is the free starting point many creators use — its core editor is free and its core exports are generally watermark-free, per its listing.

If your video is mostly narration over visuals, consider whether a script-to-video tool would assemble the first draft for you instead: you paste a script and get a narrated video you can then improve with your generated clips. Either way, the generated footage is raw material — the edit is where it becomes a video someone finishes watching.

Step 6: Export — and check the rights before you publish

Before exporting, check two facts on the listing of the tool you used: whether your plan removes the watermark, and whether your plan allows commercial use. Free-plan output from many generators is watermarked, and some free plans ban commercial use entirely — our guide to using AI-generated video commercially explains the rules with examples from real listings.

Export at the aspect ratio and resolution your platform expects, keep the project file and your prompts, and you are done. When you are ready to go further, the top tools ranking shows which generators our directory rates highest overall, and the tool finder matches a tool to your specific job if you are still deciding.

Putting it together: one short video, start to finish

Here is the whole workflow at a real scale. Say you want a 30-second vertical clip advertising a coffee brand. You plan five shots of a few seconds each: beans pouring into a roaster, steam rising from a cup, a hand lifting the cup toward the light, the café window at dawn, and an end card — which you will build in the editor rather than generate, because models mangle text and logos. You write five prompts using the five-part formula, generate each shot twice at draft settings, and keep the better take of each pair.

Assembly takes about twenty minutes in a free editor: trim every clip to its cleanest seconds, add a voiceover line or bold captions, lay a properly licensed music track underneath, and export at 9:16. Total generations: ten, of which five were thrown away — a completely normal ratio, and exactly why your cost per finished video is a number you measure rather than one the plan advertises. Notice what you never did: no camera, no location, no reshoot day. That convenience is the actual product these tools sell.

Scale the pattern up and very little changes. A three-minute explainer is thirty shots instead of five, a storyboard written before the first prompt, and a simple list of prompts and takes instead of memory. The creators who publish every week are not using secret tools — they are running this exact loop with better notes and less romance about any single generation.

• Storyboard first: a shot list written before any prompts
• Draft settings for tests, premium settings only for keepers
• Logos and text added in the editor, never generated
• Keep the prompts saved with the project file