AI Video Generator from Text
Turn text prompts into video with Luma Ray. The quality of your output depends heavily on how you write your prompt — this page covers what to include, what to avoid, and how Luma Ray interprets scene, motion, and style descriptions.
What goes into a strong prompt?
Subject and action
Describe what's in the frame and what it's doing (not just "a person" but "a woman in a red coat walking briskly")
Camera and Framing
Define the type of action you expect wide shot, close-up, drone view, tracking shot — Ray responds to explicit camera language.
Motion and mood
Do you envision a slow drift or rapid cut? Describe the effect of the video — cinematic, photorealistic, animated.
Setting and Context
Provide the environmental details that ground the scene – where and when, time of day, lighting conditions.
Examples of weak versus strong prompts
Realistic Action
1. Character/Action (Photorealism)
Weak: "A man running"
Strong: "A man in a gray hoodie sprints down a rain-slicked alley at dusk, camera tracking alongside him at shoulder height, streetlights blurring in the background, shallow depth of field, photorealistic"
Why it works: Specifies subject (gray hoodie), action with intensity (sprints, not just runs), setting (rain-slicked alley, dusk), camera behavior (tracking, shoulder height), and a clear style anchor (photorealistic, shallow depth of field) — leaving little for the model to guess.
Animated Style
Weak: "A dragon flying"
Strong: "A small green dragon with oversized wings flaps awkwardly through a candy-colored sky, 2D animated style with bold outlines and flat colors, camera following from below as it dips and wobbles between fluffy clouds"
Why it works: "Animated" alone is too broad — there's 2D, 3D, stop-motion, anime, and more. This prompt names the specific style (2D, bold outlines, flat colors), gives the dragon personality through motion (flaps awkwardly, dips and wobbles) rather than generic flight, and specifies a camera position that adds dynamism.
Product Shots
Weak: "A coffee cup on a table"
Strong: "A ceramic coffee cup sits on a wooden café table near a window, steam rising slowly, morning sunlight streaming in at a low angle and catching the steam, camera slowly pushing in toward the cup, soft cinematic color grade"
Why it works: Adds material detail (ceramic, wooden), motion that's subtle but present (steam rising, camera pushing in — important for video vs. a static image prompt), lighting specificity (morning sun, low angle), and a style/grade descriptor that signals mood.
Convert your text into videos in 3 simple steps:
Write Your Prompt
Describe subject, action, camera, and style. Specific beats vague.
Generate with Luma Ray
Ray interprets your prompt and generates video with consistent motion and visual style.
Refine and iterate
Adjust your prompt based on the result — add camera direction, change pacing, or specify style more precisely — and regenerate.
Why Choose Luma's AI Text-to-Video Generator?
Luma's AI Video Generator turns text descriptions, images, and prompts into cinematic, production-quality video in minutes. Powered by Ray, a reasoning-driven model that resolves composition, motion, and scene logic before generating a single frame, you can produce output that matches creative intent from the first generation — with native 1080p video and HDR output. Try Luma now for free.