Prompt guides for Seedance, Veo and Kling
from their own docs

How do the official prompt guides compare?

The shared rules: concrete words, one job per reference image and timing written out. On negatives they split: ByteDance and Kling want positive descriptions, while Google’s Veo 3.1 guide says “describe what you wish to exclude”.

What does the Seedance 2.5 prompt guide say?

ByteDance’s guide asks you to “Treat Seedance 2.5 as a visual content producer” and write in this order:

1. References first. Name each image, video or audio file by upload order and say what it is for, for example the subject, the voice or the camera move.
2. A one-sentence summary: “Subject + Location + Event + Genre/Style + Camera movement”.
3. The plot, split by timestamps or “Shot N”, with visuals, camera, action, dialogue and sound for each segment. Use 1-second units, and do not cram too much into one window or the model cuts too often.
4. Notes on what stays the same, such as camera angle, setting and sound.

Two rules stand out. “Use positive descriptions whenever possible”; negatives work for subtitles and audio. And do not put a character’s name only inside their image: the guide warns it “can easily cause character confusion or duplication”. ByteDance also recommends its own Seedance 2.5 Skill to optimise prompts.

What does Google’s Veo prompt guide say?

Google’s Veo 3.1 guide uses a five-part formula: “[Cinematography] + [Subject] + [Action] + [Context] + [Style & Ambiance]”. It calls the camera part “the most powerful tool for conveying tone and emotion”.

• Sound: put speech in quotation marks, and write sound on its own line, such as “SFX: thunder cracks in the distance” or “Ambient noise: the quiet hum of a starship bridge”.
• Several shots in one clip: timestamped segments, from [00:00-00:02] to [00:06-00:08], each with its own shot.
• Negatives: describe what to exclude. The Veo 3.1 guide’s example asks for a scene “with no buildings or roads” rather than “no man-made structures”. For the negative prompt itself, Google’s prompt guide, which covers both Veo and Gemini Omni Flash, says not to write “no walls” but to list what you don’t want, as in “wall, frame”.
• Help: Google suggests using Gemini “to analyze and enrich a simple prompt”.

What does Kling’s prompt guide say?

Kling’s older text-to-video guide gives a formula: subject and description, subject movement, scene and description, then optional camera language, lighting and atmosphere.

The Kling 4.0 guide, dated 26 October, goes further:

• Be literal. “Use descriptive language and minimize abstract terms and negative instructions.” Instead of “premium look”, it suggests describing side backlighting, a blurred background and matte grain.
• Few negatives. “Negative prompts can increase the likelihood of errors.” The two worth writing are no subtitles and no background music, because the model may add them by default.
• Roles for every file. Files are numbered @Image1, @Video1 and so on. Without a role, “the model will infer their intended use, making the results less predictable.”
• Room to write. Prompts can run to 8,000 tokens.

For Kling 3.0, Custom Multi-Shot, a switch in the interface, lets you set each shot’s content and length, as in Kling’s example “shot 1, profile shot of black man driving a truck, cinematic handheld. Shot 2, frontal macro shot…”

Do JSON prompts work better?

None of the official guides we read mentions JSON. Creators disagree. In one r/VEO3 thread, one creator says: “creatively I’ve seen no difference between descriptive prompts through plain text vs. json”, and uses JSON only to keep long prompts tidy for editing. Another ran both versions and “liked then response to json better” the majority of the time, though not for every task.

JSON is a way to organise a prompt, not a feature of the models. If it helps you keep shot details straight, use it; then test the same shot in plain text.