It’s no secret: video content has become king, and videos as a part of your visibility strategy for your business is a tactic that can help boost the know, like, trust factor of your brand.
At Learn to Flourish, we specialize in eLearning creation and in today’s environment video is a must-have in learning programs! Video accommodates different learning styles and keeps your learners engaged. It is a cost-effective way to create and deploy learning and communication at an accelerated rate.
While adding video may be an after-thought to the content you’re currently creating, the value that video brings to your marketing and learning programs makes it a key component that cannot be overlooked in this digital, video age.
But if you’re a novice to video, it can be overwhelming to know what kind of software to choose. What produces the best quality video? What is the easiest to learn and use? What will set me up for video production success for the long term?
Here is a comparison of 2 good video software options that we have tested and used here at Learn to Flourish:
Lumen5 boasts that it is: “social videos made easy.” Lumen5 takes pre-written content, like blog posts and articles, and automatically converts it into a video storyboard. How cool is this?.
How does it do this? Lumen5 matches keywords in each sentence to an image in its library, and it automatically highlights what it thinks are the keywords from the sentence. Hello, Artificial Intelligence (AI)!
Each scene of the video is created from a single sentence, and for each scene created you can swap out the images and choose new pictures and/or video clips. While you can go with the default images that the software chooses for you, I typically swap out the images for a lot of the scenes because the preselected images don’t tell the story that I want to tell. Still, the capability is there and the AI generated scenes give me a great starting point!.
There is a surprisingly good selection of video clips in the library that you can use free of charge. If you want access to the full library you can upgrade to their premium service.
You can also add background music directly from their library. They have TONS of tracks to choose from and you can search for styles of music by how the tracks are labelled (ex. happy, dark, funky, etc).
With Lumen5, you can also use your own images and videos, but with the free version of the software, you are stuck with Lumen5’s branding on the last scene.
One huge limitation of Lumen5 is that you CANNOT add voiceover to your videos. This can be a drawback if you are creating a training video.
Lumen5 Hack: In the text document that you are going to use as the “script” for your video, put periods after each single concept–even if it doesn’t make sense grammatically. This way, Lumen5 will create more scenes and you can highlight the key-words for each concept. Once the scenes have been created you can change the punctuation as needed, but it will save you time in the long run by creating the scenes initially.
Lumen5 is definitely the easiest software to use, but at $50-$99/month, you want to make sure that you are going to be making a ton of videos to justify the cost of the premium version. Keep in mind that you can use the free plan forever but are stuck with the Lumen5 branding in every video and lower video quality.
Finally, Adobe Spark is another video creation option for the business owner looking to add video to their content plan.
Apart of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite of applications, you can use Adobe Spark to easily create social graphics, video stories, and even web pages with its user-friendly interface and focus on branded content.
Adobe Spark is easy to use and free. It gives the ability to add scene-by-scene voice over (a huge bonus if you are creating a training video), and you can add images, videos, icons, text and background music. Choose media assets from their library, or load your own.
Conclusion
While these two video creation softwares have their pros and cons, the favorite here is hands down Lumen5.
It is the easiest program of these to learn and implement, and the fact that it can take a pre-written script (like a blog post or article) and turn it into the foundation of a video that we then just simply tweak to meet our creative, brand standards is huge for video creation people like us.
Maybe it will be the perfect addition to your family of programs as you create video content to grow and expand your own business.
As an example of how Lumen5 can work for video content, here are two example videos that we created using Lumen5:
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