Priya runs enablement at a 40-person SaaS company. A new analytics dashboard was launching Thursday and she needed a three-minute onboarding video. No camera, no voiceover budget, no editor. She shipped it Wednesday afternoon using Elai.io for less than the price of a team lunch.
Below is the sequence she used, written as a walkthrough you can actually follow. No philosophy about the future of video, just the clicks, the settings, and the numbers that change the output.
Write the script before you touch Elai.io
The biggest time-waster is opening the editor first and writing into it. You end up rewriting on the fly, regenerating scenes, and burning through your monthly video minutes.
Three minutes of finished narration is roughly 430 to 480 words at a conversational 150 words per minute. Draft it in a plain document and break it into scenes of two or three sentences. Each scene should carry exactly one idea, because one scene becomes one clip.
Priya’s script looked like this:
- Scene 1 (0:00 to 0:18): “Your dashboard now updates every five minutes instead of every hour. Here’s what changed and where to find it.”
- Scene 2 (0:18 to 0:45): “Open the Overview tab. The three tiles at the top are your live numbers.”
- Scene 3 (0:45 to 1:15): a screen recording of the new filter panel
- Scene 4 (1:15 to 2:00): “Saved views are the part most teams miss. Set one up once and it follows you into every report.”
- Scene 5 (2:00 to 2:40): what changed for admins, plus the one setting they need to check
- Scene 6 (2:40 to 3:00): where to ask questions
That’s six scenes and about 460 words. Two of the six aren’t talking-head clips at all. Planning for that on paper makes the edit much faster.
Set up the project and lock your aspect ratio first
Create a new project and pick your dimensions before anything else. A 16:9 1080p canvas is the default for a website or LMS. Vertical 9:16 for Reels and Shorts, square for a LinkedIn feed. Switching later won’t always survive the layout, so choose once and commit.
Skip the template gallery on your first pass unless one matches your use case closely. Starting blank with a plain background beats stripping someone else’s graphics out.
Paste the script and let the editor split it into scenes
Dropping your text in produces one scene per paragraph. From there, work through them one at a time and keep each under about 28 words. Anything past 40 words leaves the avatar holding a static pose for too long, and viewers feel that drag even if they can’t name it.
What to do with a scene that’s too long
Split it rather than trimming the idea. Then change something visual between the halves: a new background, a different framing, or a cut to b-roll. Two 15-second scenes with a visual break read better than one 30-second scene that never moves.
Pick an avatar based on framing, not looks
The stock library is bigger than you’d expect. Choose on three criteria: head-and-shoulders framing, wardrobe that fits your industry, and a background you can live with for the full three minutes. A casual tee against a kitchen wall reads fine for a startup update and wrong for a compliance module.
If you plan to produce ten or more videos, a custom clone is worth the setup. It takes a short recording of yourself plus a validation step. The trade-off is consistency: every video featuring the same presenter builds recognition across a series. Our closer look at Elai.io’s studio-quality output covers where clones hold up and where they still look synthetic.
Test the voice on one scene before generating anything else
Voices that sound identical in the preview can land very differently across a full paragraph. Generate scene one only, then listen twice: once at normal speed and once at 1.25x. If it grates at 1.25x, it will grate at normal speed by minute two.
Pronunciation is where most first drafts fall apart. Product names, acronyms, and anything non-English get mangled. Rewrite them phonetically in the text box and regenerate just that scene. “Kubernetes” becomes something like “koo-ber-net-eez,” and your own brand name probably needs attention too.
One budgeting note: most plans meter you by rendered minutes. Don’t audition twelve voices on full scripts. Test on a single scene, pick fast, and keep the same voice for the whole video.
Layer in b-roll, images, and screen recordings
Avatar-only video wears out fast. Aim for at least one real asset per scene. In Priya’s video, scene 3 was a ten-second screen recording of the filter panel, with the avatar shrunk into a corner layout so the interface stayed the focus.
- Keep any single clip on screen for at least five seconds; shorter reads as a glitch
- Match the energy of the clip to the narration: slow zooms for explanations, quick cuts for feature lists
- Use the built-in stock libraries for filler, but don’t let filler carry an entire scene
- Crop screen recordings to the region you’re actually discussing, not the whole desktop
Captions, branding, and the muted-viewer problem
Turn on automatic captions before you export. A large share of feed viewers watch with sound off, and captions are the difference between comprehension and a scroll. Keep them above the bottom 12% of the frame so app interfaces don’t cover them.
Branding should be almost invisible: a small logo at low opacity in one corner, your accent colour on the progress bar, a consistent lower-third. If your audience notices the graphics, they’re too loud.
Export, then watch it on a phone with the sound off
Export at 1080p MP4 with H.264. Staying under 200MB keeps uploads painless for most learning platforms. Then watch the result on an actual phone, at arm’s length, sound off first. You’ll catch awkward pauses, tiny captions, and a weak opening that a desktop preview hides.
That first five seconds matters more than anything else in the file. If your opening line is “Hi, I’m Priya from the enablement team,” rewrite it as a reason to keep watching.
A realistic 90-minute production schedule
- 0:00 to 0:20 script, scene by scene, in a separate document
- 0:20 to 0:30 project setup, canvas size, avatar shortlist
- 0:30 to 0:45 voice test on one scene, then apply to all
- 0:45 to 1:05 visuals: uploads, b-roll, screen recordings
- 1:05 to 1:15 captions, logo, branding
- 1:15 to 1:25 render and phone check
- 1:25 to 1:30 fix the one scene that’s wrong and re-export
Ninety minutes is realistic for a three-minute video once you’ve done it twice. The first attempt will take closer to three hours, mostly because you’re learning the interface while you work.
Fixing the three problems that show up most
Lip sync drifting on long scenes
Almost always a word-count problem. Split the scene and regenerate. If it persists, shorten your sentence structure, since long comma-heavy sentences are harder for the engine to pace.
Robotic delivery
Punctuation is your pacing tool. Full stops create real pauses. Commas create micro-pauses. Semicolons and long parenthetical clauses flatten the rhythm, so break them. Read your script aloud once before typing it in; every sentence that trips you up will trip the voice too.
The avatar fighting a busy background
Plain or softly blurred backgrounds hold up best. Keep the avatar in the same screen position across scenes so cuts feel intentional rather than jumpy. If you want more context on which plans and assets make this easier, there’s a hands-on Elai.io review that pairs well with this workflow.
What to do once the video is live
Don’t archive the project file and forget it. Each scene stands on its own, so when the dashboard changes in six months you swap one screen recording, re-render, and ship version two in about ten minutes. That’s the real advantage over a filmed video, where a single interface change means reshooting everything.
Watch where viewers drop off. If the exit spike lands at 0:45, that’s usually the longest stretch of unbroken talking head in the file, and it’s a signal to cut b-roll into that scene next time.
When you have several videos to make, write three or four scripts before you open the editor and produce them back to back. Setup, avatar choice, and voice selection are the slow parts. Rendering isn’t.