How to plan a narrated video, write prompts that land, time captions properly, and keep your work on your own machine.
No camera, no presenter, no voice actor. Write the script first, cut it into beats, record the voice, and let each line decide how long its picture stays on screen — plus the six mistakes that make this format feel cheap.
Nearly every prompting frustration comes from one wrong assumption about how image models read text. What goes wrong with adjectives, negatives, camera moves and long prompts — and the word order that fixes buried subjects.
How much text to show at once, how to time captions without transcribing anything, why Chinese and Japanese need a different rule from English, and when to burn subtitles in versus ship a separate file.
What leaves your computer when you use an online generator, the five questions that have real answers, when cloud tools are perfectly fine, and how to check whether a "local" tool really is one.