Why your AI edit came out wrong, and the sentence that fixes it

Most bad results come from one of the problems below. Find yours, paste the fix.

These all come from real user calls, lightly paraphrased.

"It didn't cut the repetition even though I asked"

List every cut you made with timestamps. Then remove these specific repeated lines: [quote them].

"Remove repetition" is a judgment call. Quoting the lines removes the judgment.

"I asked it to copy the title style and it didn't"

Copy the title style from the reference exactly. Blocky all-caps, glow, hard drop shadow. Show me a frame at 0:02 when done.

Name the three things you can see, then ask for a frame so you can check.

"I don't know if it looked at the reference"

Describe the reference video's pacing, captions, and music in three lines before you edit.

If it can describe it, it looked. If the description is wrong, fix that first.

"My prompt overrode the reference, or the other way around"

Where my instructions and the reference disagree, follow my instructions.

"I'm spending more time going back and forth than editing myself"

One change per message, with a number.

Cut 10 more seconds from the middle. Nothing else.

Bundled fixes ("fix captions, change music, re-cut the middle") mean one of them lands wrong.

"It said it did it, but it didn't"

Read the timeline back to me with start and end times for every item.

Then compare.

"The first result wasn't worth the wait"

Ask for a plan before the first edit.

Summarize what's in my footage, then propose a structure with timestamps. Wait for my OK.

"I used ChatGPT to write a perfect prompt and it still wasn't right"

Shorter. "Professional, cinematic, engaging" tells it nothing about your footage. Five plain sentences do. Target, keep, cut, text, sound.

"It added zooms and transitions I didn't want"

Remove all zooms, transitions, and effects. Straight cuts only. Do not add anything I did not ask for.

One that worked

"When this guy is talking about a prompt, show a UI of ChatGPT and the prompt being written." It names the trigger, the thing to show, and what it should be doing. Copy that shape.

Related

• /prompts/how-to-prompt-vyra
• /prompts/reference-style
• /prompts/talking-head-cleanup