Lumen5

I ran across Lumen5 when looking for a user-friendly site for branding and creating my own short videos for promoting our company. The videos were easy to build and offered a lot of stock video and photos. I can create a video in about 30 minutes (max) and format and reformat it for different platforms with ease.

I wish I could integrate my own audio or even voice overs. Its limited in that you can only use text and stock audio. It is also very expensive compared to what you can do with it. I may switch to another product next year.

I like the ability to very quickly put together montage's that help explain my business in an illustrative format.

Sometimes it's hard to find the gifs/ images that you want to fit your mindset but that's to be expected.

The software was pretty easy to use, changing between formats for Facebook to IGTV was simple. If you enter a link/blog piece it would extract the text and create a template video for you to start working with which is good.

There are a lot of glitches with the software and it does not allow for customizations. For example, I tried exporting a video numerous times throughout a week and the audio and video was continuously out of sync even after I had reached out to customer support.

It also doesn't allow for customizations like increasing the volume of the music. If you want to upload your own video and have music overlay in the background that is not possible which interrupts the flow of the video and taking away from the professionalism.

You also can't adjust the amount of text on the screen, or adjust the size of the text, or customize the placement. There are set placements for text (bottom of the screen, top of the screen) And you can't deviate from that. There is a sliding scale for text size so if you want it to be any bigger or smaller than the presets that option is not available.

The options for background music are mediocre, some of them are really strange and it takes a lot of work searching through to find a decent soundtrack.

I liked how easy it is to convert a blog post into a video. With just a click, a like of text is added to editor, which means it's a lot quicker to get videos done.

Lumen5 had offered a 12-month free account, during which I created over 1500 videos. I stopped using it because I did not want to pay the monthly subscription after the 12 months were up. I switched to another app that offered a lifetime deal.