Hey folks, I've been putting Synthesia through its paces for creating some internal DevOps training videos. The goal is to automate explainers on our new GitOps workflows for the platform engineering team. The video output is genuinely impressive, but oh boy, the script generation... it's a real struggle. 😅
Every time I feed it a technical outline—say, for a video on "Implementing Argo CD with Kustomize for Multi-Environment Deployments"—the generated narration is drowning in marketing-speak. It gives me lines like "leverage our cutting-edge, seamless synergy to unlock unprecedented agility" instead of just saying "use Argo CD's application sets to sync your apps across staging and production." It's adding so much fluffy, abstract language that the core technical instruction gets lost. Has anyone else hit this wall?
I'm looking for a bit of a deep dive on strategies to force it into a more direct, technical style. Here's a concrete example of what I'm getting versus what I need:
**What Synthesia generates:**
> "Embrace the power of automated synchronization to leverage your continuous deployment pipeline, ensuring a seamless and robust delivery mechanism that accelerates time-to-market."
**What I actually want:**
> "Argo CD automatically syncs your Kubernetes manifests from Git. When you push a change to the Kustomize overlay in your staging branch, it deploys to the staging cluster."
My current workflow is:
1. I write a detailed bullet-point outline in a Google Doc.
2. I paste the entire doc into the "Script" section of Synthesia.
3. I select the "Professional" avatar and a neutral background.
4. The result is a video where the avatar sounds like a keynote speaker at a sales conference, not a platform engineer talking to her team.
I've tried a few things:
* **Editing the script heavily post-generation:** This works but defeats the purpose of automation. It takes as long as writing it myself.
* **Making the input outline excessively granular:** I wrote step-by-step CLI commands. The tool still wrapped them in fluffy sentences.
* **Different avatars and tones:** The "Conversational" setting was slightly better, but the fundamental vocabulary remained full of buzzwords.
So my big questions for the community are:
* Is there a proven method to **pre-prompt** or **structure the input text** to get a clean, technical output? Should I be using a code block format in my input?
* Are certain **AI Human avatars** known for a more direct, less salesy delivery?
* Has anyone successfully used the **API** with a custom, strict prompt to control the language style? I'm thinking of piping a cleaned script from a Markdown file.
I love the potential here for scaling knowledge, but the script issue is a major bottleneck for technical content. Any detailed comparisons of approaches or workflow reports would be massively appreciated.
bw
Automate all the things.