Getting Started — Your First Video
This guide takes you from a brand-new account to a downloaded, ready-to-publish video in roughly 15 minutes of active time (plus background rendering). Read this first; everything else in the user guides is a deeper dive on a single step.
What you'll do
- Sign in and land on the Dashboard.
- Click New Production and complete a 4-step wizard.
- Approve the AI's plan (or let Auto-Approve do it for you).
- Wait while the system generates assets, designs scenes, renders the video, and prepares publishing metadata.
- Download the file and copy the title/description/tags.
Step-by-step
1. Open the dashboard
After signing in you land on /video_production/dashboard. Click New Production (top-right action, also in the left sidebar).
2. Step 1 — Content & Style
The wizard opens with the Content & Style screen. Fill in only what's marked required; everything else has sane defaults.
- Video Title (required) — your internal name for the production.
- Content Type — pick how you'll feed in the source material (Topic / Article / Script / Bullets / Tutorial / Product / URL / RSS / PDF or Image / Bulk Import from JSON).
- Voiceover Script (optional, lives on this step) — paste exact narration if you want to control wording, with an Enhance with AI toggle.
- Video Format — Landscape (16:9, YouTube), Portrait (9:16, Shorts/Reels/TikTok), or Square (1:1, social feeds).
- Target Platform — narrows the duration limits.
- Duration slider — capped by your plan and your platform.
- Video Style / Tone / Look / Audience / Experience — five dropdowns that shape the AI's voice and visual treatment. Defaults are fine on a first run.
- Quality & Cost slider — five tiers (Draft / Economy / Balanced / Premium / Showcase). Default is Balanced. Advanced expander lets you override per modality (LLM, TTS, image, video, music).
Click Next.
3. Step 2 — Voice & Audio
- Skip Voiceover Generation — leave off for a normal video.
- Voiceover Language + Content Language — paired side-by-side. Content Language auto-syncs to the voiceover language unless you change it.
- Additional languages (Batch) — click to expand if you want to fan out to up to 5 extra language variants. See Multi-Language Production. Plan-gated.
- Voice — pick one and click the play icon to preview.
- Speed / Pitch / Excitement (0–5) — leave defaults if you're new.
- Background Music — pick a mood (or No Music).
Click Next.
4. Step 3 — Branding & Media
- Brand Preset — if you've saved a brand kit in the Brand Library, one click fills the whole step.
- Brand Name / Call to Action — free-text.
- Brand Colours — five-cell strip: Primary / Secondary / Accent / Background / Text.
- Heading Font / Body Font — free-text inputs (type a font family like Montserrat, Open Sans).
- Special Requirements (optional) — free-text instructions ("Always include subtitles", "Avoid showing faces").
- Auto Approve Plan — toggle this on to skip every review gate. See Auto-Approve Mode.
- Input Media (Optional) — drag images/documents in, or click From Library / From Canva. Audio and video are not accepted here.
Click Next.
5. Step 4 — Review & Create
A read-only summary of every choice. If something is wrong, click any completed step circle to jump back.
Click Create & Start Phase 1. The wizard hands off to the production detail page.
6. Watch Phase 1 run
You're now on /video_production/<id> with a 5-circle phase timeline and seven tabs (the Errors tab only appears if errors occur). Phase 1 (Planning) takes ~30–90 seconds. The page polls automatically — no manual reload.
When Phase 1 finishes, the Plan tab fills in with a horizontal filmstrip of every scene. This is your most important review point — you can rewrite the entire storyboard before a single image or audio file is generated.
See Reviewing & Editing the Storyboard for the full editing UI. For your first video, you can scroll through, sanity-check the scenes, and click the Approve & Start (Voiceover) action in the page header.
7. Phases 2–5 run in the background
| Phase | What's happening | Typical wait |
|---|---|---|
| 2 — Assets | Images, voiceover, music, clips generated | 2–10 min |
| 3 — Direction | Scene layouts designed and animated | 1–3 min |
| 4 — Render | Final MP4 produced | 1–8 min depending on length |
| 5 — Publishing | Title, description, tags, thumbnails | < 1 min |
You can leave the page — work continues server-side. Each phase pauses for review unless Auto-Approve is on. Approve in each tab as it completes.
8. Download and publish
After Phase 5 approval:
- The Video tab has the playable file with a Download Video button. The same tab also has Share Review Link for client sign-off (see Review Portal).
- The Publish Info tab has the optimised YouTube title, description, tag list, and (for multi-platform productions) per-platform metadata blocks for Shorts/Reels/TikTok.
You're done.
Real scenario — "Tuesday morning weekly explainer"
A solo content creator wants to publish one short YouTube explainer per week. Tuesday morning routine, repeated:
- Opens dashboard, scans Recent Productions to confirm last week's video shipped.
- Clicks New Production. Content type = Article; pastes their just-written blog post.
- In Step 3 (Branding & Media), clicks their saved brand preset "Channel Kit v3" — every colour, font, CTA fills instantly.
- Toggles Auto Approve Plan on (they trust their preset by now).
- Hits Create & Start Phase 1 and switches to other work.
- ~25 minutes later, opens the production page from the recent-productions list, downloads the rendered MP4, and copies the YouTube metadata.
Total active time: ~3 minutes of clicks. The rest is rendering they don't watch.
Common first-time questions
Do I lose my draft if I close the browser mid-wizard? No. Auto-save runs after each step; the draft appears in Productions with a Draft badge.
Does creating a draft consume a video from my monthly quota? No. The slot is consumed only when you click Create & Start Phase 1. Cancelling a started production does not refund the slot.
Can I edit the script after Phase 1 approval? Yes — open the Plan tab, edit any scene's Script sub-tab, then go to the Assets tab and click Regenerate Voiceover.
Where do my finished videos live? On the production's Video tab (download link) and indexed in Productions (filterable by status).
Where to go next
- Master the wizard fields → The Create Wizard
- Get serious about plan editing → Storyboard Review
- Save brand kits to skip Step 3 next time → Brand Library
- Run videos overnight unattended → Auto-Approve Mode