Claude Wrote the Script. Pictory Shipped the Video. The Handoff Was Ugly Until I Fixed It.

Claude wrote a tight three-minute script for a product explainer. Pictory turned a script into a narrated video with stock footage in about twenty minutes. The output was usable; the path to it was not, because Claude handed over Markdown with stage directions Pictory choked on.

The fix was a one-line instruction: 'plain spoken lines, no markup, one thought per paragraph.' After that, Pictory's auto-split worked and the stock B-roll matched the topic instead of guessing. Twenty minutes became twenty minutes instead of an afternoon.

Pictory's captions come from the transcript, so the cleaner Claude's script, the better the on-screen text. I stopped asking the video tool to also write, and the result stopped reading like a templated ad.

Verdict: Claude to author, Pictory to produce. Keep the script clean and the two cooperate; let formatting leak and you'll spend the saving on cleanup.