Prompting

Your prompt is the creative blueprint for the whole video, and since V2 it also carries your production settings. The separate format and duration menus are gone. What you write here decides what gets made.

Requirements: minimum 200 characters, maximum 10,000 characters. Prompts are accepted in English, German, and Spanish.

What your prompt controls

VidRush reads and respects all of the following, so put them directly in the prompt rather than looking for a setting.

Format. “Make me a documentary…” or “Make me a top 10 video…”
Length. “…a 30-minute video about…”
Title. Start your prompt with Title: followed by your title, on its own line. The thumbnail generator designs around it, so give it the title you would actually publish with. You can still correct it later in the Quote Statement.
Research instructions and links. What to research, which sources to use, and which part of the story to build the video around.
Exact hook lines. “Use the following lines as the exact hook content, do not change anything: …”
A call to action. Ask for one, for example a subscribe CTA, and the system adds it.

After you submit, the Quote Statement shows how VidRush understood your prompt. Confirm or adjust the format, duration, title, and voice there before generation begins.

The Four Pillars

Once the settings are in, the rest of the prompt is the brief. Cover these four and the script has everything it needs.

Director’s Brief. The core story, conflict, or angle, in two to three specific sentences.
Style Guide. The tone, energy, and stylistic devices you want in the narration.
Target Audience. Who is watching, and which titles they already click.
Key Facts. Dates, statistics, names, details. The more concrete material you provide, the less the AI improvises.

Style direction in the prompt

Describe the narration style you want directly: pacing, sentence length, tone, and how much distance the narrator keeps from the subject. If you know exactly how the video should open, provide the hook lines verbatim and ask for them to be used unchanged.

Write for the footage

Every claim in your script has to be illustrated with something. A prompt that is strong on paper can still produce a weak video if the subject has no footage behind it.

Before committing to a topic, run it through the B-Roll Availability Test on Overview. If a topic fails it, broaden the angle rather than the wording: the surrounding context usually has footage even when the specific event does not.

→ See Compliance & Footage Sourcing for how your Brand Profile narrows the available pool.

Prompt template

Title: The Dam That Could Start a War

Create a 10-minute investigative documentary about The Grand
Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

[Director's Brief]
[Style Guide]
[Target Audience]
[Key Facts]

Iterating on a prompt

If the first generation misses, change one thing at a time so you can tell what moved the result.

Tighten the Director’s Brief before touching anything else. Most weak scripts trace back to a vague angle.
Add Key Facts if the narration drifted or invented detail.
Adjust the Style Guide if the writing is accurate but flat.
Broaden the subject if the visuals repeated or drifted off-topic.

Prompting a talking-head project

Everything above assumes VidRush is writing your video. When you upload your own recording, you have already supplied the content, and the prompt does a different job.

It becomes context rather than a brief: what the recording is, who it is for, and what you want the finished video to do. You do not need to describe the edit. Cutting filler and dead air, choosing supporting footage, pacing, and captions all happen automatically.

The Four Pillars do not apply, because the story, style, and facts are already in your recording. What helps instead is telling VidRush what the video is for, so the supporting footage and framing match your intent.

Avatar projects are different again: the prompt works exactly as described above, because VidRush is still writing the script. See Talking Head and AI Avatar.

Before you generate

Every prompt, and every Custom Script, passes the AI Prompt Checker before generation. It flags thin footage availability, impossible visual requests, and structural problems that would break the generation, and it blocks a few things outright.

→ See AI Prompt Checker for every message and its fix.

Deeper strategy, worked examples, and advanced structures: In-Depth Prompting.