Drop a video — get the prompt back. HotPrompt's video-to-prompt AI watches the clip from a senior director's chair and reverse-engineers it into a structured text prompt you can paste into Sora, Veo 3, Kling AI, Seedance 2, Runway or Pika. It's a free video-to-prompt generator that handles photo to video with prompt, picture to video AI with prompt and YouTube video to prompt workflows in one tool.
Before vs After
Most 'video to prompt' tools just OCR the captions. HotPrompt actually watches the clip. The AI prompt video generator infers the shot list, the lens, the lighting and the grade — then writes the prompt a senior director would brief.
“Just a 6-second MP4 with no caption, no metadata.”
# Logline A young skateboarder grinds down a sun-bleached LA handrail at golden hour while pedestrians blur past in slow motion. # Visual breakdown - Setting: downtown sidewalk, late-afternoon golden hour, light haze. - Subjects: solo skateboarder in oversized tee, baggy jeans, white sneakers. - Cinematography: low-angle tracking, ~24mm wide, gimbal follow, slight Dutch tilt. - Lighting: warm directional sun from frame-right, soft bounce on the subject's face. - Color & grade: teal-and-orange contrast, lifted blacks, Kodak Portra warmth. # Pacing & beats - Beat 1 (0–2s): wide push-in as the skater ollies onto the rail. - Beat 2 (2–4s): tight tracking grind, sparks barely visible. - Beat 3 (4–6s): land + push out, pedestrians blur past in motion smear. # Style reference Spike Jonze meets Hiro Murai — handheld energy with painterly grade. # Prompt for Sora 2 A low-angle tracking shot of a solo skateboarder in an oversized tee grinding a sun-bleached handrail in downtown LA at golden hour. 24mm wide lens, gimbal follow, slight Dutch tilt. Pedestrians blur past in slow-motion. Teal-and-orange grade with lifted blacks, Kodak Portra warmth. 6s, 16:9 cinematic, 24fps. # Avoid warped legs mid-grind, melting skateboard, smeared faces, jittery handheld camera, oversaturated grade
How it works
Four steps from a video file on your desktop to a prompt you can paste straight into Sora, Veo or Kling AI — under a minute.
Drop any MP4, MOV or WEBM up to 100 MB. Vertical, landscape, square — all fine. Local-only; nothing leaves your browser until you hit Analyze.
Evenly spaced across the runtime so the AI can infer pacing — first beat, middle beat, last beat — without you having to mark cuts.
A vision model (via kie.ai) reads the keyframes and writes a logline, visual breakdown, beat-by-beat pacing, grade reference and the actual downstream prompt.
Switch the target model and the output reshapes itself for Sora 2, Veo 3, Kling AI, Seedance 2, Runway, Pika or Grok video.
Every output is plain text the downstream model can read — paste into Sora, Veo 3, Kling AI, Seedance 2 or Runway and render.
Director-grade logline + visual breakdown (setting, subjects, cinematography, lighting, color).
Beat-by-beat pacing inferred from frame-to-frame composition shifts.
Style reference (DP / director / film) that anchors the look downstream.
Target-model-aware prompt — Sora vs Kling vs Veo formats are different; the generator adapts.
Negative-prompt 'Avoid' line for common artifacts.
Length cap respected so nothing truncates on submit to the downstream model.
Pick the model you're submitting the prompt to and the output reshapes itself for that model's preferred input format.
Cinematic beat breakdown with lens calls and DP grade refs. Tuned for ~1000 char inputs.
Structured prose with explicit aspect ratio, frame rate and lens choice — Veo's strong points.
Tag-heavy motion-forward prompts. Doubles as a kling AI image-to-video prompt generator when source frames are present.
Compact, action-led prompts with explicit motion vocabulary — Seedance's strength.
Dense ~500 char prompts emphasizing camera move + subject motion + grade.
Short, punchy text prompts with negatives and motion strength hints.
There are two different meanings of 'video to prompt' floating around the internet. We do the second one.
Some tools just OCR or whisper-transcribe what's said. That's useful for talking-head videos but tells you nothing about composition, lighting or pacing.
We watch the frames and write the prompt a director would write to recreate the clip — beats, lens, grade, lighting. The actual ingredients of the shot.
Got a single still? Drop a video that's just that frame held for a second — the generator switches into image-to-video mode and adds motion vocabulary for Kling AI.
Download the clip locally first (any youtube-dl flavored tool). Then upload. We can't fetch YouTube URLs server-side, but a 30-second local export works perfectly.
Anywhere a reference clip needs to become a prompt — to remix it, to brief a model with it, or to teach yourself why it works.
See a viral 8s clip on TikTok? Save it locally and find out exactly which lens, lighting and grade made it pop.
Hand over a reference clip; get back a prompt your AI video generator using prompt input can render variants from.
A 'how to get a prompt from a video' workflow that doubles as a film-school exercise — read the breakdown, then re-shoot.
Drop a cinematic reference and get the Veo / Sora prompt to remix into cutscene mockups.
Pixverse image-to-video prompt or picture-to-video AI with prompt — drop the reference, get the recipe, render variations.
Use the breakdown as a teaching artifact in a video-production or AI-literacy lesson.
Questions
It watches. The browser samples six keyframes evenly across the clip — first beat, middle beats, final beat — and a vision LLM reads all six in time order to infer pacing, camera moves and grade. Thumbnail-only would miss everything that matters.
Anything your browser can decode — MP4, MOV, WEBM all work. We cap at 100 MB to keep the upload responsive; if your file is larger, trim it first or downscale to 720p.
Not directly — we can't fetch YouTube server-side. The workaround: download the clip locally (any youtube-dl flavored tool, or QuickTime's Open URL), then upload the file. A 30-second local export is enough for the AI to read.
Video-to-text tools transcribe what's said in the clip. We don't care what's said — we care what's seen. The output is a director's breakdown plus the prompt to recreate the look, not a transcription.
Yes — switch the target model in the optimizer and the prompt reshapes itself. The director's breakdown stays the same, but the final 'Prompt for X' section is tuned for that model's preferred input shape.
Every new account gets 10 free credits per day. A video analysis costs 20 credits (it's heavier than a normal optimize), so on the free tier you get one analysis every other day. If you need more, the Pricing page has affordable top-ups.
Pick Sora as the target model. The output 'Prompt for Sora 2' section emits a cinematic beat breakdown with lens calls and a DP grade reference — the format Sora reads best. Paste it into Sora and render.
More tools
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