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.

Here's what I liked about Lumen5
1. Creating a video is pretty straightforward: After signing up, you'll be taken to your dashboard. Click on the create video button, after which you'll be shown 3 options, create a video from an article or blog post, copy & paste your content, or create a video from scratch.

2. Instant Videos: According to Lumen5 "These are intelligently crafted videos based on your blog posts." to create an instant video you'll have to add at least 1 RSS feed. After adding a feed you'll get the notification "Successfully added! We're analyzing that feed and will send you an email when we have videos ready." It took roughly 5 minutes to receive the email but instead of waiting for the email, after two minutes I refreshed the instant videos page and there were already draft videos from my blog posts. I could then edit their suggestions and tailor it to my needs.

3. Media Gallery: Lumen5 had their gallery of images, stock music and gifs which I could use to make my videos. I liked that I could upload my own images.

4. Video Orientation: I liked that I could make a landscape 16:9 video, or a square 1:1 video.

5. Video length: Lumen5 lets you choose what speed you want the "slides" to play at, this determines the length of the video. You can choose fast, slow or normal. The number of slides also determines how long your video would be.

1. Instant Videos: I added 2 RSS feeds to Lumen5, one was to my LGBT book blog and the other was to my marketing blog. I wanted to see what intelligent videos they would create and while the video for my marketing blog was good, the videos for my book blog was horrible.
The images suggested did not match any of the blog posts. This is probably because while they have a good media gallery, the images are mostly generic or marketing related, so I had to replace all the images in the video.
What I think should be done: I think they need to add more diversity to the images in their media gallery. I know there is an option to upload my own image but I still think they need to have a varied selection of images that can be used for non-marketing related videos. I also think they need to improve their AI to select suitable images for a video.

2. Video Speed/Lenght: Currently the length of the video depends on the number of slides and the video speed, ie fast, slow or normal. However, if you choose "fast" this speed is applied to all the slides.
What I think should be done: I'd like to be able to vary the speed of each slide, there are some slides I'd like to be longer than the rest because it might have a lot more info than other slides, or because I want people to take an action or notice something specific. I'd rather not have all the slides play slowly.

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.

It's really cool to use Lumen 5 to edit videos and create unique content.

The free plan already provides many options to use, I can create videos with images or just texts that I don't appear on.

For those who are embarrassed to show up, this is very good.

There is an excellent option in Lumen 5 that allows me to capture my Blog content, such as articles and automatically convert it to videos. This saves me a lot of work time.

Some people complain about posting something with watermarks, but that doesn't bother me, I think if I'm using something from a brand, it's because it's being useful. So we have more to disclose.

I find it very practical to create with this tool, it's totally different from conventional editors, but it's very good and easy to use.

I just choose a template and automatically the video is created. This is perfect and saves a lot of time.

I have no disagreements with Lumen 5 , a word against this tool is totally unnecessary.