First production walkthrough

This walkthrough takes you from a logged-in Studio Console to a finished, downloadable video. Plan for about 15–20 minutes of clock time (most of it waiting on the AI pipeline to run).

🎬 Create your first production

Prefer to read? Open the step-by-step transcript

A quick tour of the full flow (each step is detailed below):

1. Productions → New Production.
2. Type a Title (required — the AI helper beside it can suggest one), and pick an Avatar, a Language and a Country.
3. Click Start Production — it lands in your queue as Queued.
4. Watch the pipeline step badges advance on the production’s page. New accounts run in Controlled mode by default, so the first step pauses AwaitingRelease almost immediately — click Release Step to move it on (see Controlling a running production).
5. When Step 14 (Deliverable Packager) completes, preview the assets on the production’s page.
6. With auto-publish on, distribution starts automatically once the Step 15 gate passes. With it off, the production waits in PendingApproval until someone clicks Approve distribution.

Prerequisites

• You’re logged in to Studio Console as the account’s CustomerAdministrator, an assigned AccountOperator, or a platform admin — the three roles that can start and steer a production.
• Your account has at least one Avatar configured. If not, see Managing avatars first.
• Your account has token allowance remaining.

The walkthrough

1. Open the New Production page.

   From the left sidebar, click Productions → New Production. You’ll land on a form titled “New Production”. If you work across several accounts, pick the Account first.

2. Give it a title.

   Title is required — it’s the subject the production is about (e.g., “How do solar panels work in winter?”). The AI helper beside the field proposes candidate titles from the account’s content niche if you’d rather not write one.

3. Pick an avatar.

   Choose one Avatar from the account’s tiles — that voice and face narrates the production. A production needs an avatar to start today; if the account has none, create one first (see Managing avatars). Two-character, dialogue-style productions aren’t made here — they’re queued from the account’s Talks queue.

4. Confirm the language and country.

   Language and Country are required. They’re filled in from the avatar you picked (or your last production), so usually you only check them.

5. (Optional) Adjust the active steps or governance.

   Active steps starts from the account’s default pipeline plus the always-required steps; change it only to run a different shape for this one production. Governance overrides (collapsed) lets you override Auto-publish and Execution mode for this production only — handy for a one-off test you don’t want distributed.

6. Click “Start Production”.

   The production lands in your queue with Status = Queued. Within a minute, Step 1 (ProductionBriefGenerator) starts and you can watch progress on the production’s page.

7. Watch the pipeline run.

   The production detail page shows each pipeline step with a live status badge:

   • Queued (waiting for upstream)
   • InProgress (pulsing — running now)
   • Complete ✅
   • Failed ❌ (recoverable only for specific steps — see Troubleshooting)
   • AwaitingRelease (paused for an operator to release it — the normal state under Controlled or Step-through mode, not a failure)

   Steps 1–4 (text generation) take ~1–2 min total. Steps 5–6 (image acquisition + analysis) ~3–5 min. Steps 7–11 (image/voice/video production) ~5–10 min depending on length. Steps 12–15 (variants, attribution, gates) ~1–2 min. Those timings assume nothing is holding for release — under Controlled or Step-through mode, add however long it takes an operator to release each held step.

8. Review the result.

   When Step 14 (Deliverable Packager) completes and the brief clears the Step 15 gate, preview every asset inline (thumbnails, audio players, video posters) on the production’s page. To download an asset, open it from the Media library.

   What happens next depends on the account’s Auto-publish setting (see Account settings): with it on, JARAI hands the production straight to distribution once the gate passes. With it off, the brief moves to PendingApproval.

9. (If auto-publish is off) Approve distribution.

   A PendingApproval production shows a Waiting for your approval to distribute banner at the top of its page, with an Approve distribution button. The account’s CustomerAdministrator, an assigned AccountOperator or a platform admin can click it, and the production goes to distribution. There’s no separate “reject” verb — if you don’t want it published, use Cancel Production.

What you’ll see at each stage

Stage	What’s happening	What you can do
Steps 1–4	Brief → Narrative → Beats → Scenes (text generation)	Read the generated story on the production’s page; cancel if it’s wrong
Steps 5–6	Image acquisition + analysis	Watch the per-scene images arrive — the pipeline picks the image for each scene
Steps 7–10	Per-scene image production + voiceover TTS + scene-video composition	Preview audio and video stills on the production’s page; Refine & Re-run the voiceover (8) or video (10) with a different prompt or model
Step 11	Platform variants (16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1) rendered	Preview each variant inline
Steps 12–15	SEO metadata + attribution + final packaging + gates	Download from the Media library for manual upload, approve distribution, or let auto-publish (if enabled) hand off to distribution

Controlling a running production

How much you steer a production depends on the account’s execution mode (set in Account settings):

• Autonomous — runs end-to-end without stopping for review.
• Controlled and Step-through — both currently pause after every step that does work and wait for an operator to release it before the next step starts. (The plan is to make these two modes different — Controlled pausing at a configurable subset of steps, Step-through at every one — but that hasn’t shipped yet, so today they behave the same.)

Controlled is the default — read this before your first production

Every new account is created in Controlled mode with auto-publish off. That means your first production will pause AwaitingRelease after Step 1, before you’ve had a chance to watch much happen. This is expected, not a hang.

To move it on: open the production’s page, find the step row showing AwaitingRelease, and click Release Step. The account’s own CustomerAdministrator, an assigned AccountOperator or a platform admin can do this. Reject on a held step cancels the whole production rather than just that step. You’ll also get an email each time a step is held, with Release / Reject links — they open the production’s page scrolled to the held step, with that button focused.

The same three roles have the other production verbs on the production’s page:

• Retry Step — on a Failed Step 8 (Voiceover), 10 (Video composition), 12 (SEO metadata) or 15 (Gates), the steps whose output can be cleanly replaced.
• Refine & Re-run — on Step 8, 10 or 12 once it’s Complete or Failed: change the prompt or the model, then re-run the step.
• Manual Override — on a step that isn’t already complete or held: record how you resolved it and let the pipeline continue. This is the way past a failed step that has no retry.
• Cancel Production — at the top of the page, on any production that hasn’t finished.

If the account has client approval required, finished productions instead wait for the customer’s sign-off via the Client Portal before publishing.

Tip

For recovering failed or stuck productions — retries, dead-letters, provider outages — see Troubleshooting.

Where to learn more

• Production pipeline (Steps 1–15) — full reference for what each step does
• Troubleshooting — what to do when a step fails
• Distribution and publishing — platform-specific publishing details