In the past 5 years, Video is taken over the world by storm. Be it marketing, entertainment or education video is everywhere.
According to Syndacast, 74% of all Internet traffic is from video content.
If you have created video for social media or your website, you’ll know how hard it is to create even a 2 min video. Even if you have the necessary tools it requires a lot of experience and time to create such videos.
But thanks to some awesome Saas tool it has made creating basic video a child’s play.
Today, in this Lumen5 review, we’ll talk about the capabilities of this AI video tool that has taken the world by storm.
Lumen5 is a video maker for creating beautiful social media videos effortlessly. It’s probably the fastest social media video creation tool online. It just takes a few minutes to create a video.
But what makes it so fast? Lumen5 uses AI to add relevant images & video to create the perfect video. You just need to enter a blog url & your video will be ready in seconds.
If you have seen videos with floating text, then that’s probably made from Lumen5. The best part is that you need not add any images or videos to create a video, it fetch it from it’s inbuilt library of millions of media files.
Who is Lumen5 for ?
Lumen5 is for anyone who loves creating and sharing videos. It’s especially useful for startups & agencies who are limited on resources. You can easily crank out a lot of videos in day using Lumen5.
If you’re a marketer, social media enthusiast or a video person, you’ll love the power Lumen5 brings to the table.
Lumen5 Setup
I was lucky enough to pick up Lumen5 for free on AppSumo. But you can always opt for the free trial to get started and check the tool out.
After creating an account on Lumen5, just click on the create video button. You need to then choose the aspect ratio for the video. For example 1:1 for Instagram.
You can either start by entering a URL or pasting some block of text. Then you need to choose a theme. There are more than 20+ themes to choose from.
Lumen5 automatically creates video timeline according to post or the text you feed. In most cases it also pulls in the images from the blog post. It also randomly selects particular lines from the content. Most of the times you’ll need to change the text.
Features
Story
This tab will show you all the content pulled off from the blog post. You can easily change the text you want to show in the frame. There’s also the option to drag the images to the frame of the video.
Timeline
Depending on the length of the post, the video is divided into 10-12 frames. This would result into the 40-60 seconds depending on the speed of the video. There are three options here –
1. Preview
2. Title
3. Speed
4. More option (change brightness, crop a photo)
Media
The media tab enables to use all the videos, gifs & images from the Lumen5 database. There’s a large connection of free images & videos too.
Music
Are you a music lover? The right choice of music can really change the effectiveness of a video. There are a lot of free audio tracks available. You also have the option to upload your own audio, but it’s premium feature.
Style
Under the Style tab you can add –
Brand Presets – Using this you can create different presets depending on the type of video you’re trying to create. You can set colours, themes, fonts, text colour & outro.
Format
The format tab quickly changing the aspect ratio of your video. Even if you chose a different aspect ratio during creating a new video, you could change the ratio from the format tab.
Preview
Using the preview tab, you can easily play your’re video to check if everything’s proper before publishing the video.
Publish
Using the publish button you can directly download the video or you also have the option to Facebook. Depending on the video duration, it takes 4-5 minutes to process each video. Once processed it’s automatically downloaded or you can download it by going to the dashboard.
Dashboard
This screen helps you access all the videos you’ve made through Lumen5. You can also start creating a new video.
Settings
You have the option to create multiple workspaces. Also, in the premium version you can add other team members to your account. This is quite helpful in team collaboration.
Instant Videos
This option really shows off the AI used in the tool. Lumen5 automatically creates videos of the new blog posts you add to your blog once it has the access of the RSS feed. Surprisingly the videos are quite good. Once Instant videos are ready you’ll be notified using an email.
Advantages of Lumen5
Let’s look at some of the advantages of Lumen5 :
1. I was mesmerized by how easy is to use the tool & create videos. Even if you haven’t used any video tool before, you’ll be able to use it correctly.
2. The tool is especially great for anyone looking to pump out many video in a short time. It really creates videos very fast.
3. There’s a freemium version to help users get used to the product before buying the tool.
Disadvantages of Lumen5
Here’s what I hate about Lumen5 :
1. I would love to have a little more customisation options. I know the value proposition of the tool is very different, but I’d love a few more customisation options, like increasing the font size.
2. The freemium version has a lot of limitations. Apart from limiting the quality to 480p videos, you also have the Lumen5 branding at the end of the video.
Pricing
When billed annually the starter plan starts at 19$ per month. This goes up to 500$. Now, let’s look at the different features in every plan.
Free Plan
1. Quality upto 480p
2. 5 Video per month
3. Access to the Standard media library
Starter Plan (starts at 19$/month)
1. Quality upto 720p
2. Access to 15 million photos & videos
3. There’s no Lumen5 branding
Premium (starts at 49$/month)
1. Quality upto 1080p
2. Access to 2 million photos & videos from Shutterstock & Getty
Business (starts at 149$/month)
1. Upload custom outro, music & brand’s font.
2. Access to 180 assets each year
Enterprise (starts at 500$/month)
1. Multiple users
2. A Dedicated Account Manager
3. Create Videos in upto 30+ different languages
Overall I felt the pricing was on the higher side, owing to the limited features it brings to the table.
Alternatives of Lumen5
Let’s look at some of the alternatives of Lumen5 :
Invideo
Invideo is another very popular online video creator tool. It has a special custom workflow feature which allows to create videos automatically using workflows.
The free InVideo plan is quite better than Lumen5 with support up to 720p. The premium version however starts at 20$ a month.
Animoto
Animoto is another popular video creation tool for creators. It’s helps you create awesome videos for social media.
Overall Animoto is better video tool when compared to Lumen5, especially because of the flexibility. However, there’s no free plan in Animoto. The basic plan starts at 5$/month & goes up to 49$/month. According to Buffer it’s best tool for creating “Short Social Videos”.
Adobe Spark
Adobe recently launched its own social media creation tool, Adobe Spark. It starts at 10$ a month. The tool is made for people to create high quality social media videos quickly.
It has some cool features such as resizing, color palettes, and style suggestions. However there’s a small Adobe Spark branding if you’re on the free plan.
Ratings
Let’s look at the ratings of Lumen5 on sites like Capterra & G2Crowd.
Capterra
On Capterra, Lumen5 has a good rating of 4.5 out of 79 reviews. A lot of people have spoken positive about Lumen5 in the reviews. Many even claimed it to be the “Best Social Media Creator Tool”.
In most reviews, people praised the blog-to-video feature.
G2Crowd
On G2Crowd, people have rated Lumen5 4.5 stars. In the reviews, people really complained about the limited features in the free version of Lumen5.
Summary
If you’re looking to create quick social media videos, then Lumen5 is indeed a great choice. It helps you publish high quality animated videos in 2-3 clicks. The main advantages of Lumen5 is it’s AI engine.
Lumen5 makes it very simple to create a video. This makes it very user friendly. You just to enter a URL & everything’s taken care of by Lumen5. I especially like how Lumen5 creates new video automatically & send you an email notification by fetching details from the RSS feed.
Hence, if you are someone who is looking to create videos without a lot of customisation then Lumen5 is great choice. It’s certainly the future of video. Hope you’ll be able to take a better purchase decision after reading this Lumen5 review. For more Saas reviews, visit our homepage.