Lumen5

I like how it is so easy to create a video without even copying and pasting the script/Article. I just put the link, and start the creation, and rest easy.

Well, I hate that I got copyright claim using a free music... so I don't know why it happened...

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.

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 love that Lumen gives me the ability to make short videos of my blogs. The pictures it chooses for the video 95% of the time match perfectly with the contents of the blog.
The templates are beautiful, I use them for youtube videos but they have well-structured template variation options for different aspect ratios such as 1:1 for Instagram.
I have never seen any other video tool giving the option of creating videos from the blog feed i.e instant videos which Lumen5 does. This is my go-to feature and saves me so much time.

I am on a plan which doesn't give a brand kit customization option so it takes additional time in customization, but I use the instant video option so I already have a video 95% premade so it works for me.